or your website guide to . . .

WELCOME to this collection of practical suggestions . . .

is an important addition to the SAPS web site, which has always been a rich source of novel ideas for investigations.

contains outline protocols that use widely available plant material and simple equipment. There is sufficient information to get you started, but you will need to develop your chosen protocol into a fully-fledged investigation - and you certainly need to do your own planning. can be used alongside our ever popular Help with Investigations pages. There are trigger questions to get you thinking creatively, and lots of hotlinks to sites where further information can be obtained. If you devise new or better methods of carrying out any of these investigations with plant material, let us know. Perhaps your protocol will be added to .

is organised into different themes. Each theme then has a cluster of practical activities, as indicated by the buttons. Within each theme, you will find links to different parts of the AS or A2 specification (syllabuses) in biology (for England, Wales and Northern Ireland), and to the relevant post-16 Scottish qualifications. These practical activities are also appropriate for certain GNVQ courses in biology and related subjects. In the future, we may identify and add specific links for some of these GNVQ courses as well. Try a topic that interests you, or use your specification links as a starting point.

The first theme to be launched uses fruits and vegetables as your material to be investigated - your experiments could be based on respiratory activity, water potential, biochemical tests for sweetness, assays of colours and lots of fresh ideas for looking at enzyme activity. This all relates to changes after harvest . . . see OSMOSIS 18 for an introduction to these ideas.

And if you get carried away . . . out of the SAPS website, remember you can just click on your back button to return to the menu page or protocol in where you started.

CLICK below to enter your website guides:

Your website guide to . . . investigations with fruits and vegetables