Unit 3, Booklet A is a practical skills assessment. It assesses students’ ability to carry out two practical tasks based on but not identical to the nine prescribed practicals listed in this specification.

Booklet B is a written, externally assessed examination taken during the final year of study. It assesses students’ knowledge and understanding of practical science. It consists of questions about planning and carrying out any of the prescribed practical tasks, together with more general questions about any practical situation that arises in Units 1 and 2 in this specification.

Choose your experiment:

• Ramps - Use simple apparatus to investigate experimentally how the average speed of an object moving down a runway depends on the slope of the runway measured as the height of one end of the runway

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• Springs - Investigate experimentally the extension of a spring and how it is related to the applied force, and recall that the extension of a spring is directly proportional to the force applied, provided that the limit of proportionality is not exceeded

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• Moments - Plan and carry out experiments to verify the Principle of Moments using a suspended metre rule and attached weights or a pivoted beam and square weights

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•  Density [FREE]  - Investigate experimentally the relationship between the mass and volume of liquids and regular solids, and analyse and interpret the data gathered

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• Power - Plan and carry out experiments to measure personal power, either by measuring the time taken to climb a staircase or performing a number of step-ups to a platform

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• Refraction - Use ray tracing to measure the angles of incidence and refraction when light is refracted by a glass block and to use the measurements taken to plot a graph of angle of incidence against angle of refraction to show that they are related but not proportional

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• Characteristics of a Wire [FREE] - Use a voltmeter to measure the voltage across a metal wire and an ammeter to measure the current passing through the wire, and recall that this shows that the current and voltage are proportional for a metal wire at constant temperature, and that this is known as Ohm’s law

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•  Resistance of a Length of Wire [FREE]  - Investigate experimentally how the resistance of a metallic conductor at constant temperature depends on length and obtain sufficient values to plot a graph of resistance (y-axis) and length (x-axis)

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•  Electromagnets  - Investigate, describe and recall how the strength of the magnetic field depends on the current in the coil, the number of turns in the coil and the material used as the core of the coil

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