At Key Stage 4 the specification sets the content and time is short. The lessons here are built around GCSE topics, and most use technology for one of two things.
The first is sharper feedback on exam thinking. Year 11 work through electrolysis multiple-choice questions by peer instruction. Year 10 vote on how useful a 1915 recruitment poster is, before and after they learn its provenance. Year 11 weight five reasons Hitler became Chancellor on a shared slide deck.
The second is real evidence at a scale that suits older students. Year 10 test the 'Bloody Code' against 1,500 Old Bailey trials. Year 10 measure cliff retreat at Happisburgh on Google Earth historical imagery. Year 11 take samples from CensusAtSchool data and watch every sample mean charted live.
Longer pieces of making are here too, from a GCSE art portfolio site with voice-over on each piece to a Twine decision story on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Art
Students build a Google Sites portfolio of the term's work, with a time-lapse clip of each piece in progress and a recorded commentary on intentions and choices.
Students write a p5.js sketch whose colours, movement and density are set by live weather readings, then leave it running on a screen for a week.
Students build a lantern from willow, card and tracing paper and code the micro:bit inside it so its light pattern changes when a passing visitor's shadow falls across it.
Students model a real spot in the school grounds to its measured size in CoSpaces Edu and design a kinetic sculpture for it, coding its parts to move and to change when a visitor clicks it.
Computing
Each student writes a Python program that answers a yes-or-no question with a random reply from a list of eight answers they wrote.
Groups of four, two students from each of two schools, write one Python number-guessing game over a staff-hosted Teams call, passing the driver role between schools every ten minutes.
Students write a prediction for each of eight short Python snippets, run it in a shared Replit project, and explain in one sentence any prediction that missed.
Students translate three OCR Exam Reference Language algorithms into Python, test them in Replit, and post them to Padlet so the teacher can compare contrasting versions.
Students post bugs from a planted-error Python function to syntax and logic columns on Padlet, and the teacher targets the bug nobody found.
Students place sticky notes on the weakest parts of an office network diagram in FigJam, then propose fixes and vote on which to make first.
Students write test cases from a password rule, ask Copilot Chat for a password checker from a one-line brief, run its code against their tests in Replit and find out which rules it assumed.
Drama
Pairs film each other's 30-second monologues, post them to a class-only Padlet, give peer notes on one delivery skill, and re-record after a targeted warm-up.
Students vote on Mrs Johnstone's motivation, watch the two most popular readings performed, then vote again.
Students comment on one page of Act 3 of The Crucible with the choices they would make as director, and the teacher stages the most contested moment.
Students annotate the Inspector's 'fire and blood and anguish' speech in their own Google Doc with the pace, pause, volume, gesture and movement they would use as the actor.
The teacher films pairs performing a rehearsed non-contact slap in slow motion from the audience's position and from the side, then replays the clips so the class sees how the illusion works.
Design and technology
Each student draws three annotated festival-wear designs on separate layers over one locked figure template in Procreate, and tests two colourways for the strongest.
Each student models a three-part desk phone stand to a set of phone dimensions in Tinkercad and exports it as an STL file.
Students draw the six panels of a blue tit nest box with finger joints in Tinkercad, lay them flat and export an SVG for the laser cutter.
Each student designs a logo for a fictional sustainable trainer brand and lays out one sheet showing it at three sizes, in three colour treatments and in single-colour black.
Groups seal a school phone running phyphox inside three packaging designs, drop each from one metre, and compare the peak deceleration the sensor records.
The teacher zooms into high-resolution images of Bauhaus objects, from Marianne Brandt's tea infuser to Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs, while Grade 10 note the design decisions behind each one.
English
Pairs record a podcast episode in which each partner argues a different reading of duality in Stevenson's novella, backed by quotations read aloud.
Students argue a thesis on a contemporary issue as a Google Sites page, with a short video commentary, links to two primary sources and an argument map that jumps to the evidence.
Pairs build the Birlings' dining room in CoSpaces Edu and write two versions of each character's speech, coded so the visitor hears the guarded or the cornered version depending on which clues they have found.
Students count sentences carrying two semantic fields of their choice across the whole of A Christmas Carol in Google Sheets, chart the results stave by stave and build an argument from them.
Students write a Twine short story that stores the reader's choices in variables, so the narrator's account of later scenes changes depending on what the reader did earlier.
Half the class reads Chopin's The Story of an Hour and half reads Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and each student posts a narrative-voice label with a justifying quotation to a class Padlet.
Students rate eight quotations from Act 1 Scene 5 and Act 5 Scene 1 on a Mentimeter scale from in control to losing control, and the class argues over the lines where the live averages are contested.
Students commit to one of three readings of Beatrice Garland's Kamikaze on Mentimeter, defend it in pairs, debate, and re-poll to see who changed their mind.
Geography
After a river fieldwork day, students build a CoSpaces Edu tour from 360 photos of four sites, with their width, depth and velocity data and a recorded commentary at each.
After a class visit to one regeneration site, each student builds a Google Earth project that pairs historical imagery with their own photos and data at five waypoints.
Students build a web page comparing a tropical rainforest and a hot desert, with climate graphs embedded from Google Sheets and collapsible explanations beside each.
Students measure the cliff edge at Happisburgh on dated satellite images in Google Earth, pool their readings in a class sheet to calculate rates of retreat, and build a mapped judgement on the shoreline policy.
Students pull four weeks of 15-minute river level and rainfall readings from the Environment Agency into Google Sheets, build their own storm hydrograph and write a flood briefing for Bewdley.
Over a week, groups follow a named hurricane as it happens, updating a Google Site each lesson with its position, pressure and winds from Windy and the sea temperature beneath it from earth.nullschool, and forecasting its next move.
Students vote on the future of Happisburgh's coastline, post stakeholder arguments to a Padlet, then re-vote before the teacher shows the actual plan.
Students answer Copilot's questions on Typhoon Haiyan one at a time, read its feedback on each answer, and check that feedback against the textbook case study before correcting their notes.
Each student pins a real migration flow on a class Padlet map and colour-codes its main push or pull factor, so the class pattern builds as the pins go in.
Students rate ten climate change sources as high, medium or low reliability in Microsoft Forms, and the teacher uses the live summary to pick the most disputed ones.
After both schools have measured a local river, a Grade 10 class pools its channel data with a partner school's in one sheet, tests both rivers against the Bradshaw model and questions the other class's methods.
Students at a UK school and a partner school in Accra log the labels of their own clothes in one shared sheet and each describe their own end of the second-hand clothing chain, so both classes can trace where clothes are made, worn and resold.
For the last two weeks of January, a UK class and a partner class in Cape Town take the same noon shadow and temperature readings into one shared sheet, then use the data to explain opposite seasons.
Pairs compare what Flightradar24's live map shows over Africa with the departure boards of eight airports, to decide whether empty patches of map mean no flights or no receivers, and test the claim that Africa is 'switched off'.
The teacher plays nearly four decades of Timelapse imagery of the Ucayali River in Google Earth, and students watch meander loops creep sideways, pinch together and leave ox-bow lakes behind.
The teacher sets earth.nullschool to early September 2019 and steps Hurricane Dorian forward a day at a time, showing its winds and then the sea temperatures beneath it, while students watch the storm sit over warm water and loosen over cooler seas.
In a morning lesson the teacher opens Flightradar24 on the board, and students watch aircraft converge on London from North America, Asia and Africa as evidence of the UK's links with the wider world.
History
After interviewing community volunteers at a staffed oral-history afternoon, each student builds a timeline of eight events with the witnesses' recorded voices beside the historical context.
Students write a Twine story in which the reader advises Kennedy at three points in October 1962, and each option opens a primary source the reader must weigh before choosing.
Students trace every name on the town's war memorial in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database, pool the records in one sheet, chart what they show and publish a school-only memorial site.
Over five lessons, a class studying the American West and a partner class in California build a joint site comparing how Britain saw the Gold Rush in 1849 with how Californians remember it today, each side revising its pages to answer the other's questions.
Students rebuild one stage of the 1914 to 1918 chain of evacuation at full scale in CoSpaces Edu from sources, walk a stretcher carry through it, and use what they find to explain why evacuation was so slow.
Students rate how useful a First World War recruitment poster is for an enquiry, then rate it again once the teacher reveals who made it and why.
Students back one of three historians' interpretations in a Padlet column, and the teacher uses the column sizes to decide who argues first.
A Grade 10 class and a partner school hold a mock hearing on who caused the war in 1914, with advocates, witnesses in role, cross-examiners and a jury drawn from both classes.
Pairs filter and count 1,500 Old Bailey trial records from 1780 to 1800 in Google Sheets to test the claim that most people convicted of theft were sentenced to hang.
A Grade 10 class and a partner class in Germany annotate extracts from each other's history textbooks on Versailles, compare their own judgements of the treaty, and question each other about how they were taught it.
Each student asks Gemini why Germany suffered hyperinflation in 1923, breaks its answer into separate claims, and rules on each one using the class source pack.
Maths
Students write a one-page revision guide for Grade 9 on finding the nth term of a quadratic sequence, with their own worked example and practice questions, and Gemini on hand to explain a step.
Starting from a p5.js starter sketch, students code the times-table circle, where point n joins point k × n mod N, and investigate which multipliers make which curves.
Students build a Desmos graph with sliders that lets a classmate discover the rules for y = f(x) + a and y = f(x + a) without being told them.
Students turn NOAA's full monthly carbon dioxide record from Mauna Loa into a Google Sheets dashboard, with a filter by decade, a trendline and a seasonal-cycle chart.
Students solve quadratics by factorising, check each pair of roots against the graph in Desmos, and fix their own errors before moving on.
Students test the angle in a semicircle theorem by dragging a GeoGebra construction, write a proof, and post it to a Padlet column for their method so the class can compare approaches.
Students each draw a random sample from 200 anonymised CensusAtSchool records in Google Sheets, and a class chart of everyone's sample means shows sampling variation.
Languages (MFL)
Students write a practice 90-word answer about a past holiday, ask Copilot to flag up to five errors without correcting them, fix each one themselves and hand in the redraft with changes highlighted.
Students translate a 60-word French passage, post it to a Padlet, then defend their choices on the two phrases where the class split.
Pairs record GCSE-style photo-card descriptions in Spanish, post them to a class-only Padlet, and check three classmates' recordings against a short checklist.
Students post one note after each of three listens to a German clip, and the teacher uses the wall to change how the next listen is run.
Music
Each student records one vocal melody, then duplicates and re-pitches it in Logic Pro to build three harmony parts over a four-chord backing.
Students record ten sounds around the school site and turn them into a 90-second musique concrète piece by re-pitching, reversing and layering them in GarageBand.
After studying Purcell's Music for a While, Edexcel GCSE students compose three variations over a four-bar ground bass, recording each as its own track in BandLab and revising one after teacher feedback.
Students compose a 90-second trailer cue for three orchestral sections, hearing each voicing choice as they make it and shaping the mix with reverb.
PE
AQA GCSE PE students practise the three lever classes on an adaptive Seneca assignment, and the teacher uses the live results to split the room between exam questions and a body-lever demonstration table.
PSHE
Students make a one-page guide that explains each line of a fictional apprentice's payslip, from gross pay and tax code to National Insurance and take-home pay.
Pairs put scripted sun-safety questions to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, reword each one three ways, and check every answer against NHS guidance.
RE
Students build a Sutori timeline of the Buddha's life from his birth at Lumbini to his parinirvana at Kushinagar, with images of each site and two quiz questions for a classmate.
Science
Students build three specified circuits in PhET, enter their current and potential difference readings in a shared Google Sheet, and use the pooled table to state the series and parallel rules.
Students vote on hard electrolysis questions, and the share of correct votes decides whether the teacher moves on, sets a neighbour discussion or reteaches.
Each student posts one change to the standard method for the rates of reaction practical, and the teacher sorts the wall live by what each change improves.
The teacher explains specific heat capacity from a slide deck with PowerPoint's live subtitles running, so every student, including those new to English, can read each sentence on screen as it is spoken.
The teacher streams the demonstration microscope's view to the board through a tablet camera and stops on a cell at each stage of mitosis in an onion root tip while students draw what they see.
At the start of the practical lesson, students watch a titration video in Edpuzzle where the teacher's own voice notes pause it at each step to point out the mistakes that cost marks.
The teacher slides a bar magnet along a metre rule towards a phone running phyphox, and the class watches the strength of a field they cannot see rise, fall away and reverse on the board.
The teacher plays two days of time-lapse footage of one of the class's own agar plates, and students watch a bacterial lawn spread while the rings around the strongest antiseptics never cloud.
A technician carries a phone running phyphox up the school stairwell while the class watches the air pressure reading step down, landing by landing, on the board.
Lessons that look like one cell but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.