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For some reason I have a face-to-face tutorial to run on Book 5 of S104: Life. This does not really make a lot of sense to me, but that is the way it is! Perhaps next year I can manage to move the tutorial date to cover a topic that interests me more?

For this topic I usually run a pipe-cleaner model of mitosis - but having just moved house I cannot find the kit.

On a recent presentation I worked up an activity using a molecule kit to build amino acids.  However I have a feeling that there was a problem with the notes I created. So I need to work through the activity to check the notes.

This check was useful revision for me, and I made a minor update to the Tutor Notes for the activity..

I realised it would be useful to have a copy of the Book 4 summary table on functional groups, so I created a Word document with the table on a single page.  This could be a handout or be projected in the room.

I also have a kit of labels for an established S104 activity on molecules, organelles and cells, which I will use.

If there is time I could also run a standard activity on food chains.

That will be plenty of interesting material for 90 minutes.

This was a Scotland-wide day school on S104's energy and light material. I ran this jointly with Laura Alexander.

We both had similar ideas for the tutorial. The only difference was our ideas on the experiment part. Laura was thinking of doing the bouncing ping-pong ball work. However my group had already done that experiment, so we chose to do a laser diffraction experiment instead. This was similar to the work for activity 9.1 and 9.2, but the students actually got the opportunity to do all the work themselves. The aim was to use the known laser light wavelengths to work out the grating spacings.

We worked in groups of two or three. The students had to work out was they needed to do, plan the work, think about uncertainties, make the records and do all the analysis including drawing the graph with the best-fit line.

I provided two HeNe lasers and a red and green laser pen. I carried out the experiment at home beforehand, and prepared a spreadsheet of results and graphs. This gave the spacing as 3.33 microns (equivalent to 300 lines per mm).

A number of people got to exactly the same result. Everyone got reasonably close to my value.

So the structure was SI units, energy dominoes, laser diffraction experiment, then either maths work (Laura) or spectroscopy demonstration. The spectroscopy demonstration included the solar, fluorescent tube, HeNe laser output and the HeNe laser tube non-laser output spectra.

The bulk of the day was devoted to the experiment. This would benefit from some additional demonstration time at the beginning, as people were slow to appreciate what they needed to do.