Heart rate and exercise, taught nine ways.

Year 8 have learnt that a warm-up should raise the pulse gradually, and they now plan one for a Year 7 netball lesson. Each student fills a one-slide PowerPoint template with three phases, pulse raiser, mobility and a netball-specific finish, choosing activities and timings and adding a line for each on what it does to the heart and muscles. The slide uses a table sized to the laminated cards the department uses in the sports hall. The teacher prints the plans, marks them against the warm-up criteria from the unit, and picks three for their authors to lead in the next practical, with any student not taking part that week coaching from the side.

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons, pairs make a 90-second video for Year 7 explaining why a cool-down matters and how to do one. In the first lesson they write a script and film each other doing four cool-down activities on a school tablet, with anyone not taking part in practical filming and directing. In the second they build the video in Adobe Express for Education on school accounts, adding their clips, a recovery curve copied from the unit notes, captions, and a voice-over they replay and re-record until the explanation is clear and within time. The teacher watches each draft and gives one piece of feedback on the science before the final export. Finished videos go on a class Padlet set to school login so Year 7 tutors can show them, and nothing is posted publicly.

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

Over two lessons, Year 8 pairs build a micro:bit pacer that also carries a model of the heart. In MakeCode, pairs program it to beep at a step rate chosen with the A and B buttons, from 15 to 40 steps a minute, and to show a heart icon that beats at a model heart rate their program calculates: it starts at a resting value, climbs towards a target set by the step rate while the test runs, and falls back when the stepper presses both buttons to stop. Most first versions jump straight to the target and drop straight back, so pairs test on the simulator and write rules for how quickly the rate rises and recovers. In the second lesson each student does one-minute step tests at two rates with a pair's pacer, counts their own pulse straight after and again a minute later, and compares it privately with what the model heart showed; nothing is written on shared sheets or collected. Pairs then rewrite their rules, and the class discusses, with no pupil's numbers shared, which features of the model matched real bodies and which it still leaves out, such as fitness.

Tools: MakeCode, micro:bit Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have counted their own pulse before and after exercise and now need to read what a heart-rate graph says about a sport. The teacher gives each pair a FigJam board on school accounts, holding five typical heart-rate curves the teacher has drawn, with no labels, and five sport cards: a 100 m sprint, a marathon, a football match, a yoga class and a three-round boxing bout. Pairs drag each graph to a sport and add a sticky note pointing to the feature that decided it, such as three peaks with dips between them for the boxing rounds or the long plateau for the marathon. The teacher circulates and challenges any pair whose reasoning rests on a single feature. The lesson ends with each pair writing a sentence per sport in their books linking the shape of the graph to the demands of the activity.

Tools: FigJam Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are about to run a short interval session: two minutes' walking, four rounds of thirty seconds' shuttle running and thirty seconds' rest, then three minutes' recovery. Before they move, each student sketches on a Desmos Classroom sketch screen how they expect heart rate to change across the session, against a time axis the teacher has labelled. The teacher watches the sketches arrive on the dashboard, overlays them anonymously on the board, and uses the overlay to open two arguments: the many sketches where heart rate drops back to resting in every thirty-second rest, and the few where it climbs round after round. Students revise their sketch after the discussion, then in the sports hall they check it against their own pulse, counted for fifteen seconds at three points and noted privately, while anyone not taking part runs the stopwatch and calls the intervals.

Tools: Desmos Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have counted their own pulse, but nothing in school can measure how much oxygen a body uses as a heart approaches its limit. The teacher has arranged, through a local university's outreach team, a staff-hosted Teams call on school accounts with a sports scientist in the physiology lab, where an adult student athlete who has agreed to take part runs on a treadmill wearing a heart-rate monitor and a gas-analysis mask that measures breathing and oxygen use. Groups propose how the test should go, and during the call the class votes on when the speed or gradient rises, within the limits the scientist sets for the athlete's safety, each group predicts the next heart rate before the scientist reads it out, and groups enter predictions and readings into a shared Google Sheet that charts them. The class asks the scientist to explain the moments the data surprise them, such as heart rate and oxygen use levelling off near the athlete's maximum while breathing keeps quickening. The lesson ends with each group writing what the test showed about the limits of the heart and lungs that their own pulse counts could not.

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

Year 8 begin the unit in the classroom before the practical lessons. The teacher shows a four-minute animation, chosen from YouTube and played from the teacher's account, following the heart and lungs at rest and during a run: working muscles needing more oxygen, the heart beating faster and harder, breathing deepening, and carbon dioxide being carried away. The teacher pauses twice to write resting heart rate, working heart rate and recovery on the board, and students copy each term with a one-line definition. The class then learns to find the radial pulse at the wrist and count it for fifteen seconds, multiplying by four, with each student keeping their own number to themselves.

Tools: YouTube Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have a practical circuit next lesson and need the theory first. The teacher loads a short YouTube explainer on the heart's response to exercise into Edpuzzle and records five voice notes at chosen points, each tying the clip to the circuit, such as "When you finish the shuttle runs on Thursday, this is what your heart is doing." There are no questions in the clip. Students watch alone with headphones in the classroom, rewinding any part they missed, then write a half-page summary of resting heart rate, working heart rate and recovery in their books. The teacher checks the Edpuzzle progress view during the lesson and sits with anyone who has skipped sections, watching those parts again with them.

Tools: Edpuzzle, YouTube Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 know that heart rate rises with exercise, but counts taken before and after a run hide the shape of what happens in between. The teacher pairs a chest-strap heart-rate monitor with phyphox's Bluetooth heart-rate experiment on a phone and shares the live graph to the board through phyphox's remote access, so the only heart rate on screen is the teacher's own. The teacher sits for two minutes to show a resting line, steps up and down on a bench to a metronome for three minutes, then sits for four more, while the class watches the trace rise before the first step, climb, level off into a steady state and fall away, quickly at first and then slowly. The teacher pauses at each of these moments to name it: anticipatory rise, steady state, recovery. Students sketch and label the curve in their books with the teacher's resting and peak figures beside it, ready to compare with the pulse counts they take on themselves in the next practical and keep to themselves.

Tools: phyphox Nine ideas for your own version in Generate