Physical Sciences Incursions

Physical Sciences is the strand about how things move and how energy travels. In the early years that means pushes and pulls, rolling and sliding, testing which materials and shapes float, and sorting materials as transparent, translucent or opaque to see how light travels in straight lines and makes shadows. By the middle years it is forces you can measure on a spring balance, friction you can compare across surfaces, and heat you can track from one object to another, with temperature and heat treated as two different things.

By Year 5 and 6 it is circuits, conductors and light behaviour. Students compare chemical and mechanical sources of electricity by using batteries and then turning a hand-crank generator, and they use diffraction gratings, lenses and UV-reactive materials to look at dispersion, magnification and ultraviolet light.

It is also the strand most likely to be taught from a worksheet, because the equipment is fiddly and the failure modes are messy. That is the gap these sessions fill. We arrive with the trolleys, torches, batteries and wire, and every student gets their hands on them.

The programs below span three year bands. Each one lists the Victorian Curriculum 2.0 content descriptions it addresses on its own page.