Interactive Transform RE lessons for Grades 11 and 12.

Year 12 are studying the cosmological argument for OCR. On school-approved accounts, each student asks Gemini to summarise Aquinas' arguments from motion, from efficient cause and from contingency, and pastes the summary into a Google Doc beside the English Dominican translation of Summa Theologiae I, question 2, article 3. They test each sentence against the text, watching for common slips such as claiming Aquinas argued that the universe must have had a beginning in time, or reducing the Third Way to "everything has a cause". Each sentence is marked accurate, distorted or absent from the text, with the line of Aquinas that settles it. The class then compares where different students' summaries went wrong, discusses why these misreadings are so common and judges how far an AI summary can be trusted as a route into a primary text, ready to meet Hume's criticisms next lesson.

Tools: Gemini for Education, Google Docs Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 12 are studying salah and how Muslims fix the five daily prayers by the sun: Fajr begins at true dawn and Isha once the evening twilight has gone, which calculation methods define as the sun reaching an angle below the horizon, commonly between 15 and 18 degrees. Pairs set Stellarium to London, Edinburgh and Makkah on dates in December, March and June, step through the night and record the sun's lowest point below the horizon. They find that in London in late June the sun never sinks more than about 15 degrees, so by an 18-degree definition twilight never ends, while in Makkah the sun passes 18 degrees below the horizon about 85 minutes after sunset. Pairs then compare midsummer timetables from several London mosques, identify the approaches scholars take to these weeks, such as a lower angle, the time from the nearest day when twilight does end, or a fixed share of the night, and explain each in the terms its supporters use. Nobody is asked about their own prayer practice.

Tools: Stellarium Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 12 are studying sawm and questions of authority in Islam, including why British Muslim communities have sometimes begun Ramadan on different days. Pairs open Stellarium, set the location to Mecca and the date to 17 February 2026, the day of the new moon, and step to sunset to find the Moon's altitude above the horizon, how much of it is lit and how long after the Sun it sets. They repeat this for London and Jakarta and for the two following evenings, recording each result in a table and comparing it with the guidance that a very thin crescent low in a bright sky is rarely visible to the naked eye. Pairs then read short statements from three positions, local sighting, following the Saudi announcement and astronomical calculation, and decide which evening each position would treat as the start of the month. The lesson ends with a written judgement on whether calculation removes the need for sighting, and what would be lost if it did.

Tools: Stellarium Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 13 are studying the challenge of secularism for OCR Developments in Christian Thought. The teacher has loaded the Office for National Statistics tables on religion for every local authority in England and Wales in 2011 and 2021 into one Google Sheet, leaving out the few authorities whose boundaries were merged between the two censuses. Pairs first confirm the national picture, with the share describing themselves as Christian falling from 59.3% to 46.2% and those reporting no religion rising from 25.2% to 37.2%, then sort, filter and add a change column to find where the fall was steepest and where it was smallest. They test two claims from their reading: that secularisation is spreading evenly across the country, and that it is strongest in large cities. The lesson ends with each pair writing a paragraph that uses at least four local figures and notes that the Census question on religion is voluntary.

Tools: Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate