Chirality can be seen in many objects, from galaxies to flowers, and from foods to medicine. Students explore what chirality is using mathematics, chemistry and biology through creating models, doing experiments, learning why collaboration in science is important, and having a go at some persuasive writing.
In this lesson students experience first-hand how collaboration between scientists helps make scientific discoveries by using clues from different researchers to build their own DNA model.
In this activity students carry out an activity to see if they can tell the difference between drinks that contain sugar and those that contain sweeteners. They then use research to write a persuasive email to the director of a soft drinks company to convince them to use a chiral form of fructose in their drinks.
Students explore numbers in nature using a number of objects, discover that Fibonacci numbers and spirals frequently appear, and explore why this might be.
Students learn to recognise chiral molecules and then witness a demonstration to see how plane polarised light is rotated in different directions by different chiral forms of a chemical.