Lab
See the idea. Put it to the test.
956 practicals from Kindergarten to Year 12, in 9 subjects. A practical gives the idea, what you need, the steps, what you should see and a safety card. A teacher-led practical gives the idea and its hazards; its method is for tutors on the learning platform.
Review
Reviewed before publication (owner’s confirmation, 24 September 2026). That covers every practical here, and a practical’s page lists the sources its author read.
A safety card on every page
The risk, who supervises and the hazards. The 38 teacher-led practicals show their idea and hazards here; their materials, steps and sources, and any result, control or note that states a number or an amount, are for tutors and administrators on the learning platform.
School laboratory, not for home
207 practicals are medium or high risk. Each says so on its page: In a school laboratory, with a teacher supervising, under the school's risk assessment. Not for home.
Curriculum references
Each practical lists the NSW syllabus outcomes and Australian Curriculum v9 codes it supports. They are references, not a verified or complete curriculum alignment.
Find a practical
122 practicals
Biology · page 1 of 3
Celery in coloured water: how plants move water
Water travels up a plant through fine tubes to the leaves, which is how a plant gets the water it needs; in celery those tubes run up the crisp leaf stalk.
PracticalLow riskHow much water do living things need in a day
Living things need water every day, and the amount can be measured and compared.
PracticalLow riskLeaves: sorting by shape, edge, texture and smell
Plants have external features that differ from plant to plant and can be observed with the senses and used to group them.
PracticalLow riskMinibeast close-up: drawing and grouping features through a bug viewer
A magnifier shows features that are too small to see by eye, and counting those features, legs, body parts, antennae and wings, sorts every small animal in the schoolyard into groups.
PracticalMedium riskSeed in a jar: watching a bean sprout
A seed is a living thing that grows a root first and then a shoot when it has water, air and warmth.
PracticalLow riskSorting animals by their external features
Animals can be grouped by features anyone can see and count: number of legs, body covering, wings, fins or shells.
PracticalLow riskWhich part of the plant do we eat: making a class salad
Foods come from named parts of plants: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds.
PracticalLow riskDo seeds need air: germinating under water and on damp cotton wool
A seed needs water and air together: seeds on damp cotton wool grow roots, the same seeds held under still water swell and rot, and dry seeds do nothing at all.
PracticalLow riskGrowing lettuce and radish from seed to plate
Food plants are grown by giving them soil, water and light, and the time from seed to harvest can be counted in days.
PracticalLow riskMealworms: watching a life cycle
An animal changes form as it grows, and the stages happen in a fixed order that can be recorded over weeks.
PracticalLow riskSchoolyard minibeast survey: where small animals live
Small animals live in places that give them what they need: damp, shade, food and cover.
PracticalMedium riskSeedlings lean towards the light
Plants grow towards the light they need, so a seedling lit from one side bends that way.
PracticalLow riskWhat do plants need: seedlings with and without water and light
Plants need water and light, and a fair test that removes one need at a time shows what each one does.
PracticalLow riskWhich side do snails choose: damp or dry
An animal moves to the conditions its body needs, and a choice chamber lets the animal show its need.
PracticalLow riskBean in a jar: watching a plant life cycle begin
A seed germinates into a seedling with a root and a shoot, the first stage of a plant life cycle that a learner can measure day by day.
PracticalLow riskWho lives in leaf litter? A funnel survey and a food web
A handful of leaf litter holds consumers and decomposers that depend on the producers above it, the trees that dropped the leaves, and sorting what lives there by what it eats builds a real food web from the school grounds.
PracticalMedium riskDecomposers at work: what rots in a sealed bag?
Decomposers such as fungi and bacteria break down dead plant and animal material and return nutrients to the soil, while made materials such as plastic are not broken down.
PracticalMedium riskBlubber glove: how a fat layer keeps a seal warm in cold water
A structural feature, a thick fat layer, slows heat loss and lets an animal survive in cold water, and the effect can be measured as the temperature a thermometer holds inside a fat-lined glove.
PracticalLow riskCamouflage hunt: which colour survives on the grass?
Colour that matches the habitat is a survival feature, and counting which coloured items a class of predators finds first turns camouflage into data.
PracticalLow riskLeaf shape and water loss: flat leaf, rolled leaf, waxy leaf
Plants in dry habitats have small, rolled or waxy leaves because water loss depends on the surface exposed to air, which a learner can show with paper leaves of equal mass and a balance.
PracticalLow riskWhich beak for which food? Tongs, tweezers and spoons as bird beaks
A bird's beak shape suits the food in its habitat, and modelling beaks with tools shows how a structural feature decides what an animal can eat and where it can survive.
PracticalLow riskLight or dark: how light changes the way seedlings grow
Light is a physical condition a plant needs to make its own food, so seedlings in darkness grow tall, thin and yellow and then collapse once the food stored in the seed is used up, while seedlings in light grow short, sturdy and green.
PracticalLow riskSchoolyard habitats: measuring physical conditions and counting who lives there
Places a few metres apart in one schoolyard have measurably different temperature, light and soil moisture, and the number and kinds of small animals living in each follow those physical conditions.
PracticalMedium riskConstructing a dichotomous key for ten school-ground plants
A useful key is built from observable, unambiguous structural characters, and separating n groups always takes n minus 1 couplets.
PracticalLow riskDuckweed population growth: exponential start, limited finish
A population with plenty of resources grows by a constant proportion each day, and growth slows as space or nutrients run out.
Practical, model not builtLow riskEutrophication in a jar: fertiliser run-off and algal growth
Adding nutrients to still water increases producer growth, and the extra biomass changes the conditions for every other organism in the system.
PracticalLow riskLeaf litter invertebrates: Tullgren funnel extraction and a dichotomous key
Organisms are classified by shared structural features, and a dichotomous key turns those features into a repeatable series of either-or choices that ends in a named group.
Practical, model not builtLow riskPond water under the microscope: protists, algae and the kingdoms of life
Living things include single-celled organisms that move, feed and photosynthesise, and they are classified into kingdoms by cell structure rather than by size.
PracticalLow riskRandom quadrat sampling: estimating how many plants are on the oval
A population too large to count is estimated from random samples, and the estimate tightens as the number of samples grows.
Practical, model not builtLow riskAlgal balls and hydrogencarbonate indicator: photosynthesis and respiration in one tube
Photosynthesis removes carbon dioxide from water and respiration adds it, and an indicator that tracks carbon dioxide shows which process dominates under each light condition.
PracticalLow riskLeaf surface temperature: transpiration as evaporative cooling
Evaporation removes heat from the surface it leaves, so a transpiring leaf runs cooler than one whose stomata are sealed, the same physics that makes sweating cool skin.
PracticalLow riskMeasuring with a microscope: field of view, magnification and a scale bar
The width of the field of view is a known length at each objective, so the size of a cell can be estimated by counting how many fit across it.
Practical, model not builtLow riskPlant and animal cells: onion epidermis and cheek cells side by side
Plant cells have a wall and a regular shape while animal cells do not, and both have a nucleus and membrane visible after staining.
PracticalMedium riskPlasmolysis in red onion cells: the membrane pulls away from the wall and returns
The cell membrane controls what passes into and out of a plant cell while the cell wall keeps its shape: in a strong salt solution water passes out of the cell, so the membrane and the purple vacuole shrink away from the wall, and in pure water they swell back.
PracticalLow riskPondweed and light: oxygen bubbles against lamp distance
Photosynthesis in the chloroplasts of a water plant releases oxygen, and the rate of release falls as the lamp moves further away and less light reaches the plant.
Practical, model not builtLow riskPotato cylinders in sugar solutions: mass change across a concentration series
Plant cells take in water through the cell membrane from a dilute solution and lose it to a concentrated one, so potato cylinders gain mass in water and lose it in strong sugar solution, and one concentration in between gives no change.
PracticalLow riskSheep heart dissection: chambers, valves and the thickness of the walls
The structure of each part of the heart matches its job: the left ventricle wall is thickest because it pumps blood to the whole body, and one-way valves keep the flow in one direction.
PracticalMedium riskStomatal density: counting pores on the two faces of a leaf
Stomata are the pores through which a leaf exchanges gases and loses water, and their number per square millimetre can be measured from an impression and a calibrated field of view.
Practical, model not builtLow riskTesting a variegated leaf for starch: where photosynthesis happens
Starch is made only in the parts of a leaf that hold chloroplasts and have had light, so the iodine test maps where photosynthesis occurred.
PracticalMedium riskTranspiration with a straw potometer: water uptake against air movement
Water that evaporates from a shoot is replaced by water drawn up the stem, so the rise of the lower end of the water column in a narrow straw measures how fast the shoot takes up water, which closely tracks transpiration.
PracticalLow riskWater transport in celery: dye rising through the xylem
Water travels up a celery stalk through xylem vessels, and the rate depends on how fast the leaves lose water.
PracticalLow riskAsexual reproduction by cuttings: rooting success as an investigation
A piece of a plant can grow into a complete, genetically identical plant, and the conditions that favour rooting can be tested with a controlled comparison.
PracticalLow riskCauliflower cloning: tissue culture under aseptic conditions
A tiny piece of plant tissue on a sterile nutrient medium can regenerate a whole plant, because its cells keep the full set of instructions; micropropagation, the technology built on this, is used by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to clone endangered plants and in commercial crop propagation.
PracticalMedium riskFlower dissection: male and female parts and the ovules inside
A flower is a reproductive organ whose parts are arranged for pollen transfer and fertilisation, and its structure can be read from the outside in.
PracticalLow riskInvoluntary responses: the knee-jerk reflex and the pupil reflex
Some responses bypass conscious control: the knee-jerk kick follows the tap too fast to feel as a delay because the pathway runs through the spinal cord, and the iris adjusts the pupil to light without any decision being made.
PracticalLow riskMicroorganisms on hands: sealed agar plates before and after hand hygiene
Hands carry living microorganisms that grow into visible colonies on a nutrient surface, and hand hygiene reduces how many are transferred without sterilising the skin.
PracticalMedium riskPollen tube growth on a slide: watching the step before fertilisation
A pollen grain grows a tube toward the ovule when it lands on a suitable surface, and that growth can be watched and measured on a slide within a double lesson.
PracticalLow riskPulse and breathing rate before and after exercise: body systems responding together
When muscles work harder, the nervous system raises heart rate and breathing rate together, so the circulatory and respiratory systems deliver more oxygen and carry away the extra carbon dioxide the muscles produce; when exercise stops, both rates fall back toward resting over several minutes.
PracticalLow risk
For tutors and administrators
The materials and steps of every teacher-led practical are on the learning platform, with the safety card first. Sign in with a tutor or administrator account to read them.