Science has two jobs that technology is unusually good at: pooling a class's results, and showing what the eye cannot see.
Pooling turns thirty small experiments into one large one. Year 8 put their spring extension results in a shared Google Sheet to find the outliers. Year 10 work out the series and parallel rules from PhET circuit readings gathered in one place. These sit in Interactive Amplify.
Seeing the unseen is mostly Passive, and none the worse for it. Year 7 watch a five-day time-lapse of their own copper sulfate crystals growing. Year 10 watch a phone magnetometer trace a bar magnet's invisible field live on the board. Year 11 watch air pressure fall as a phone is carried up three floors of stairs.
Polls catch misconceptions before they set: Year 8 vote and re-vote on where a tree's mass comes from. That lesson belongs to a set that takes one topic through every cell: photosynthesis, taught nine ways.
Creative Amplify
Pairs script and record a 45-second spoken answer in GarageBand to a question from Grade 1, such as where a puddle goes, re-recording until it is clear enough for six-year-olds to follow.
Groups of three script, narrate and edit a 90-second Adobe Express video answering a Grade 5 teacher's question, why do plants need light, for the school's transition day.
Creative Replace
Each child designs a fact card in Canva for one of ten materials, with a drawing, its state at room temperature and its melting temperature, ready to print for a class ordering game.
Each student makes a six-panel comic in Canva following one carbon atom from a bus exhaust, through a stoma and a chloroplast, into starch, into a caterpillar and back into the air.
Creative Transform
Pairs code a Scratch model in which 24 particle clones jiggle in place, slide about or fly around the stage as a temperature slider passes 0°C and 100°C, then test each other's models for things real water never does.
Each student codes a Scratch model in which light and carbon dioxide sliders set the rate of oxygen bubbles, then rewrites its rule until it matches the class's own pondweed results.
Interactive Amplify
Pairs test a tray of objects with a magnet, photograph their two piles, post them to magnetic and non-magnetic columns, and the class investigates the objects pairs disagree on.
Pairs post a predicted newton meter reading for pulling a box of books with and without rollers, the teacher runs the demo, and pairs reply to their own post with what happened.
Grade 7 vote in Mentimeter on where most of an oak tree's mass came from, meet van Helmont's willow experiment, argue in pairs and vote again, while the teacher uses both results to steer the rest of the lesson.
Grade 7 work through a Seneca assignment on particles and states of matter, and the teacher stops the class part way to reteach the question most students are getting wrong.
Students build each of the first ten elements particle by particle in PhET's Build an Atom, using its live readouts to correct their builds, then draw each shell diagram in their books.
Each student places three elements in metal, non-metal or metalloid columns on a class Padlet with a property justification, and the teacher uses the split placements for the plenary.
Grade 8 answer five checkpoint questions in an Edpuzzle video on digestion, and the teacher reteaches the one most of the class got wrong before they move on.
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.
Each student adds one method change for the free-fall practical to a shared sheet with its estimated effect on uncertainty, and the teacher sorts and challenges the estimates live.
Students post inferences about what a six-mark biology mark scheme rewards, and the teacher groups them live into revision rules.
Students rank four answers to an A-level chemistry 'suggest' question by expected marks, then compare the class ranking with the marks each answer earns against the mark scheme.
Interactive Replace
Children open the teacher's Book Creator template and drag four word labels onto a photo of a sunflower, drawing a line from each label to the part, after pulling up a real sunflower in the school garden.
After handling real objects, pairs answer a twelve-question Microsoft Forms quiz, choosing wood, metal, plastic, glass or fabric for photos of classroom objects, and the teacher reads the answers after school.
Groups drag twelve animal pictures into four habitat zones on their own copy of a Microsoft Whiteboard board, adding a sticky note that gives one reason each animal is suited to where it lives.
Pairs drag eight pictures of everyday changes, from a dripping ice lolly to a misted bathroom mirror, under melting, freezing, evaporating or condensing in a Seesaw activity, then type a reason for two of them.
Pairs work through a teacher-built PowerPoint dichotomous key, clicking Yes or No at each question, to name ten pond invertebrates from photographs.
Pairs drag nine leaf-feature cards onto nine function cards on a Microsoft Whiteboard board, then place each matched pair on a cross-section of a leaf.
Students answer an eighteen-question Microsoft Forms quiz on organelle functions and cell types, with results held back until the teacher returns them next lesson.
Students drag label boxes and arrows onto four cell images in their own copy of a PowerPoint file, removing the labels that do not belong, and hand it in for marking.
Students paste their own typed notes on respiration into Gemini, ask for ten questions with no answers, type their answers from memory in a new Doc and mark themselves against their notes.
Interactive Transform
Pairs heat and cool water molecules in PhET's States of Matter: Basics simulation, testing three predictions about what particles do as a solid melts, a liquid boils and a gas is cooled again.
Over two weeks, Grade 7 read the carbon dioxide and light curves from a sealed plant box at the start of each lesson and choose the next condition to test, building a chain of tests the sensors record day and night.
Passive Amplify
Grade 3 watch three short clips the teacher has chosen, molten iron being poured, a gallium spoon melting in warm water and liquid nitrogen boiling in a bowl, and place each material on a temperature line in their books.
Grade 6 watch the teacher's narrated PowerPoint, exported as a video, that traces blood through the heart with a recorded heartbeat, pausing at three points to sketch the route.
Before making their own leaf peels, Grade 7 watch the teacher's microscope view of stomata and guard cells, sent live from a tablet camera to the board.
The teacher shows NASA's live view of Earth from the ISS on the board, pointing out clouds, coastlines and the thin atmosphere, with a recorded clip ready if the feed drops.
Students read a teacher-written Google Doc on the carbon cycle and listen to a short Mote voice note from the teacher beside each of its four diagrams, before drawing the cycle from memory in their books.
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.
During a space topic, Reception watch NASA's live video from the International Space Station, spotting sea, cloud and land that the station is passing over at that moment, and look again after lunch to see how the view has changed.
Passive Replace
The teacher drags photographs of twelve everyday materials, from a brick to the bubbles in a fizzy drink, into three columns on the board after Grade 3 have each decided solid, liquid or gas on mini whiteboards.
Before lighting any flame, Grade 6 watch the technician's five-minute safety video on the board and answer the teacher's spoken safety questions.
Grade 7 follow a teacher-led slide story of Joseph Priestley's and Jan Ingenhousz's experiments, predicting each result in their books before it is revealed, and end by building the word equation from what the experiments showed.
Grade 7 open the cells and microscopy knowledge organiser as a view-only Google Doc, cover the definitions and test themselves on 15 keywords before a written exit ticket.
Grade 8 read a four-page atomic structure chapter as a Google Doc, make notes in their books, then answer six questions set on the board.
Passive Transform
Grade 3 watch slow-motion footage of dry sand and water poured side by side by two of their classmates, seeing separate grains bounce and heap up while the water breaks into drops, joins up again and settles flat.
The class watches a time-lapse, filmed by a school tablet over five days, of the copper sulfate solutions they set out to evaporate, as crystals appear and grow.
A tablet films the class's potassium permanganate beaker overnight in time-lapse, and Grade 6 watch hours of diffusion in under a minute and measure the spread.
Grade 7 watch a 48-hour time-lapse of their own hydrogencarbonate indicator tubes turning purple under the lamp and yellow in the dark, played and paused by the teacher.
A school tablet films the teacher's lithium, sodium and potassium demonstration in slow motion, and Grade 8 watch the replays on the board to record what the eye missed.
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.
Children put frozen ice hands in sun and in shade side by side, a tablet films the trays in time-lapse all morning, and after lunch the class watches the whole melt in two minutes 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.