Passive Transform Science lessons for middle school.

Year 7 are learning how to separate a soluble solid from a solution. Last week each group, wearing goggles, poured warm copper sulfate solution into an evaporating dish and left it on the side bench, where a plugged-in school tablet on a stand filmed all six dishes in time-lapse mode for five days. This lesson the teacher plays the time-lapse on the board, pausing where the first crystals appear at the edges and replaying the stretch where they grow into blue, flat-sided crystals. Students watch and note when their own group's crystals first appeared and how their shape developed, then look at the real dishes on the bench. They finish by writing an explanation of crystallisation that uses what they saw in the replay.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 7 are learning how substances move into and out of cells by diffusion. At the end of the previous lesson the class set up a beaker of still water with a ruler taped behind it and a clock in shot, and the teacher, wearing gloves and goggles, dropped a single crystal of potassium permanganate into it with tweezers. A school tablet on a stand filmed the beaker overnight in time-lapse. Today the teacher plays the footage on the board: purple colour spreading slowly out from the crystal over many hours, squeezed into under a minute. The teacher replays it, pausing at regular clock times so students can read how far the colour has spread, and students plot distance against time in their books and explain, using the particle model, why the spreading slows down.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

On Monday the class set up two bunged boiling tubes of hydrogencarbonate indicator, one with a sprig of pondweed and one without, in front of an LED lamp on a plug-in timer that switches on and off every twelve hours. A school tablet on a stand records the tubes in time-lapse for 48 hours, with a dim green bulb, far too weak for the pondweed to photosynthesise faster than it respires, so the camera can see through the dark hours. On Wednesday the teacher plays the two days back in under two minutes: the class watches the pondweed tube turn from orange-red to purple under the lamp, drift back through red to yellow overnight and turn purple again when the lamp comes on, while the tube without pondweed stays orange-red. The teacher replays each switch of the lamp and asks what the colour says about carbon dioxide in the tube, and students fill in a strip in their books showing the colour every six hours, with a sentence on photosynthesis and respiration for each.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 are studying the reactivity of Group 1. The teacher carries out the standard demonstration of lithium, sodium and potassium in a trough of water behind a safety screen, with rice-grain-sized pieces, goggles for everyone and the class at the distance the risk assessment sets. A school tablet on a stand behind the screen films each reaction in slow motion. The reactions are over in seconds, so the teacher then plays the slow-motion footage on the board, stopping at key frames: lithium fizzing steadily, sodium melting into a ball and skating across the surface, and potassium catching fire with a lilac flame. Students record observations for each metal in a table in their books and use them to write the order of reactivity and a word equation, such as sodium + water gives sodium hydroxide + hydrogen.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate