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
65 practicals
Earth and space · page 1 of 2
Day and night with a globe and a torch
Day and night are an observable change in the sky, and a globe turned beside a lamp models what causes them: Earth is a ball that turns once a day, so the side facing the sun has day while the other side has night.
PracticalLow riskMoon diary: recording the moon's shape for a month
The moon's lit shape changes in a cycle of about a month, growing from new to full and shrinking back.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSeasons: keeping a term-long record of daylight and temperature
Days get longer and warmer or shorter and cooler through the year in a pattern that repeats, and the change can be measured week by week.
Practical, model not builtLow riskShadow stick: tracking the sun's path across a day
The sun's position changes through the day in a repeating pattern: shadows are long in the morning, shortest near midday and point the other way in the afternoon.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStar patterns: finding the Southern Cross with a star wheel
Stars form patterns that keep their shape while the whole sky turns through the night and shifts through the year.
PracticalLow riskEarth's place in the solar system: a playground model of the planets
Earth is one of eight planets orbiting the Sun, and the planets are not spread evenly: the four rocky planets stand within the first two and a half metres of a scale model while the four giants take up the rest of the oval.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMoon phases with a ball and a lamp
Half the Moon is lit by the Sun at all times, and a phase is how much of that lit half faces Earth, which changes through a repeating cycle of about 29.5 days.
Practical, model not builtLow riskTesting rocks: scratch, streak, fizz and soak
Rocks and minerals have observable, testable properties, hardness, streak colour, reaction with acid and water absorption, that tell us what they are made of and what they are useful for.
PracticalLow riskAcid rain on limestone: chalk dissolving in vinegar
Chemical weathering dissolves some rocks, and calcium carbonate in chalk or limestone reacting with a weak acid loses mass that a balance can track, with the fizz as carbon dioxide.
Practical, model not builtLow riskFreeze-thaw weathering: ice cracks a plaster rock
Water in a crack expands by about 9 percent when it freezes and can split rock, a slow change that a plaster brick with a water-filled cavity reproduces in a freezer overnight.
PracticalLow riskRock tumbling with sugar cubes: physical weathering by the shake
Rocks knocked together in a river or by waves lose their corners and shed grains, and shaking sugar cubes in a jar measures that wear as mass lost against number of knocks.
PracticalLow riskShadow stick: tracking the Sun across a school day
A shadow forms where an object stops light travelling in straight lines from the Sun, so the length and direction of a stick's shadow record the Sun's height and position through the day and the year.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStream table: watching water carve a landscape
Moving water erodes, transports and deposits sediment, and a tray of sand on a slope shows the channel, the load and the fan forming, with slope and flow as the variables that change them.
PracticalLow riskGlobe and lamp: why winter days are shorter
Earth spins on an axis tilted 23.4 degrees from the perpendicular to its orbit, so the axis itself stands 66.6 degrees from the plane of the orbit, and it keeps pointing the same way in space, so as Earth goes round the Sun each hemisphere spends more or less of each turn in sunlight, giving long summer days and short winter days.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMeasuring the Earth with two shadows: an Eratosthenes experiment between two schools
Because Earth is a sphere, the noon Sun stands at different heights at places north and south of each other, and the difference in angle together with the distance between them gives Earth's circumference, a measurement that needs two groups working together.
Practical, model not builtLow riskShake table: which structure survives an earthquake?
Sudden shaking of the ground in an earthquake pushes structures from side to side, and a frame braced with triangles on a wide base resists the shaking far better than an unbraced rectangular frame, which is why buildings in earthquake zones are braced.
PracticalLow riskTorch on graph paper: why low winter sunshine heats less
A beam of sunlight arriving at a low angle spreads over a larger area of ground, so each square metre receives less energy; together with shorter days this, not Earth's distance from the Sun, makes winter colder than summer.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWalking the solar system: a scale model on the school grounds
The planets orbit the Sun at vast and very unequal distances, and a planet farther out takes longer to complete one orbit, which a model built at one scale for both distance and size makes visible.
Practical, model not builtLow riskA month of Moon observations
Recording the Moon's shape, direction and time each day reveals the 29.5 day cycle and the Moon rising about 50 minutes later each day, the same lag that moves the tides later each day.
PracticalLow riskEratosthenes: measuring Earth's circumference with a partner school
Two noon shadows at different latitudes on the same day give the angle between the two sites, and the north-south distance between them scaled by 360 degrees over that angle gives Earth's circumference.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMoon phases with a ball on a stick
Half the Moon is always sunlit; the phase is the part of that lit half that faces Earth, set by the angle between Sun, Earth and Moon.
Practical, model not builtLow riskShadow stick: tracking the Sun across a school day
Earth's rotation carries the Sun across the sky, so a vertical stick's shadow swings and shortens to a minimum at solar noon, which is not 12:00 by the clock; the length of that noon shadow changes with the seasons because Earth's tilted axis changes the Sun's noon height.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSolar and lunar eclipses: shadows of a ball and a globe
An eclipse needs the Sun, Earth and Moon in a straight line; the Moon's tilted orbit keeps its shadow above or below Earth on most months, and the shadow's cone length decides whether a solar eclipse is total or annular.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSolar system to scale on the oval
At one scale the planets are specks metres to hundreds of metres apart, which no textbook diagram can show without breaking the scale.
Practical, model not builtLow riskStars return about 4 minutes earlier each night: the sidereal day and the Emu in the Sky
Because Earth moves along its orbit, a star comes back to the same place in the sky 3 minutes 56 seconds earlier each night, so the evening sky shifts through the year, a cycle that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long used as a calendar.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSun angle and energy per square metre: a torch on graph paper
The same beam spread over a larger patch delivers less energy to each square metre, which is why a low winter Sun warms the ground less than a high summer Sun.
Practical, model not builtLow riskTides at Fort Denison: reading the Moon in the tide table
The Moon's and Sun's gravity raise two tidal bulges, so a coast sees two highs and two lows in a lunar day of 24 h 50 min, and the highs are largest when Sun and Moon line up at new and full Moon.
Practical, model not builtLow riskTilted globe around a lamp: seasons and day length
Earth's axis keeps pointing the same way in space as it orbits, so each hemisphere leans toward the Sun for half the year and away for the other half, changing noon Sun height and day length together.
Practical, model not builtLow riskA mantle plume in a beaker, and why convection is no longer the plate engine
Heated viscous material rises as a plume and spreads at the surface, which models hotspots; the same demonstration shows how a model once taught as the cause of plate motion was replaced when better evidence pointed to slab pull.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskBuild a micro:bit seismometer and record a classroom quake
A seismometer records ground shaking against time; a home-built one shows that the record's size falls with distance from the source, while locating a real earthquake needs arrival times at several stations.
PracticalLow riskChemical weathering: carbonic acid from your own breath on limestone
Carbon dioxide dissolving in water makes carbonic acid, and that weak acid dissolves limestone and marble; the same reaction shapes caves and weathers gravestones.
PracticalMedium riskCooling rate and crystal size with molten salol
Slow cooling gives atoms time to join large crystals, fast cooling freezes many small ones; that is why granite is coarse and basalt is fine.
PracticalMedium riskFreeze-thaw weathering of porous rock in a freezer
Water expands by about 9 percent when it freezes, so water in pores and cracks levers rock apart a little more on each freeze, and porous rocks fall apart first.
PracticalLow riskGeological time walk: 4,600 million years on a 46 metre tape
Rock-cycle processes take millions of years; laying Earth's history along a tape at one centimetre per million years puts all of human existence in the last few millimetres.
Practical, model not builtLow riskHow far has Australia moved in your lifetime: plate motion from the national datum
Plates move a few centimetres a year, a rate a class can set beside its own fingernail growth; Australia's motion is large enough that the country's map coordinates had to be moved by about 1.8 metres between 1994 and 2020.
Practical, model not builtLow riskIsostasy: pieces of wood floating in water and in syrup
Crust floats on the denser mantle the way wood floats on water: a thicker or lighter piece stands higher and has a deeper root, which is why continents stand above the ocean floor and why crust thickened where plates converge rises as mountain ranges with deep roots.
Practical, model not builtLow riskLocating an epicentre from S minus P times at three stations
P waves outrun S waves, so the gap between their arrivals grows with distance; three distances drawn as circles cross at the epicentre.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMaking conglomerate and sandstone: cement, compaction and time
Loose sediment becomes rock when a cement grows in the pores between grains, a process the class can run in days that nature runs over millions of years.
PracticalLow riskMineral identification: hardness, streak, lustre, cleavage and acid
Each mineral has fixed physical properties, so a short set of tests separates minerals that look alike and shows why rocks made of them behave differently.
PracticalMedium riskPlate boundaries in a box: folds, thrusts and a spreading ridge with transform offsets
Pushing layers together folds and thrusts them upward (convergent), pulling paper out of slits models new sea floor forming at a ridge (divergent), and the offsets between slits behave as transform faults.
PracticalLow riskPlotting recent earthquakes and volcanoes to find the plate boundaries
Earthquakes and volcanoes are not scattered at random; plotted on a map they trace narrow belts, and those belts are the plate boundaries.
PracticalLow riskRiver in a gutter: erosion, transport and deposition
Flowing water erodes, carries and drops sediment according to its speed, so a steeper or fuller channel moves larger grains and a slowing flow builds fans and deltas.
PracticalLow riskSediment settling in a jar: sorting, layers and Stokes' law
Grains settle at speeds set by their size, so one stirred mixture lays down a graded bed with the coarsest grains at the base, the pattern that lets a geologist read which way up a rock was deposited.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSee how they run: lava viscosity, temperature and added sand
Hotter and less silica-rich lava is runnier, flows further and builds broad shield volcanoes; cooler, stickier lava builds steep cones and can trap gas until it explodes.
PracticalLow riskSorting a rock kit into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic
How a rock formed is written in its texture: interlocking crystals from cooling melt, cemented grains or layers from deposited sediment, and aligned bands or sheets from heat and pressure.
PracticalMedium riskSpectral fingerprints: hydrogen lines through a diffraction grating, and redshift
Each element gives out and absorbs light only at its own set of wavelengths, so the lines in a galaxy's light identify its elements, and the same pattern shifted to longer wavelengths measures how fast the galaxy is moving away.
Teacher-led practicalPractical, model not builtMedium riskThe expanding balloon: Hubble's law from dots on a surface
If space itself stretches, every galaxy sees every other moving away at a speed in proportion to its distance, with no centre to the expansion, which is the pattern Hubble found and the big bang model explains.
Practical, model not builtLow riskChemical weathering of limestone: reaction of calcium carbonate with dilute acid
Carbonate rock dissolves in acid at a rate set by surface area, concentration and temperature, the same chemistry that forms caves and soil from limestone.
Practical, model not builtMedium 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.