About the exemplar lessons

All the exemplar lessons are examples of lessons which could be used both individually and by whole classes of Senior High School (SHS) students in the elective sciences of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Each of the lessons is linked specifically to one of the applications in the OpenSTEM Africa Virtual Laboratory. The exemplar lesson is created to give, both to SHS students and to SHS teachers, a clear example of the ways in which the applications can be used in the learning and teaching of practical science. There is a focus throughout the lesson on the student’s development of the practical and experimental skills which, along with knowledge and understanding, are integral to the profile of learning, teaching and assessment in SHS sciences.

The ‘you’ in this lesson is ‘you’, the Senior High School student. Remember that you can repeat the experiments and activities in this lesson as often as you have time for in class. This freedom to repeat experiments and activities is also important if you are accessing the lesson outside the classroom, for example for homework. Every application in the OpenSTEM Africa Virtual Laboratory contains real data – the experiments are real experiments. This means you might make mistakes the first or second or third time you try an experiment or an activity – and that is exactly what often happens in the real world in the sciences. So, it is helpful for you as a student to share in some of the real-world trial and error of science as you develop your skills as a scientist.

The exemplar lesson also contains a set of teaching notes at the end of this document for ‘you’ the SHS science teacher, to suggest how you might want to set up this particular lesson with one of your classes. Hopefully it will also generate ideas for other lessons on the same topic, or other lessons which use the same OpenSTEM Africa Virtual Laboratory application.

Next: Lesson objectives