Year 10 Science
Notes, diagrams and self-check questions for Year 10 Science: global systems (climate), the universe and genetics revision.
For students
Each lesson page has the key ideas, worked examples and a self-check. Check-in quizzes, due dates and class materials are on QLearn.
Global systems
| Lesson | Week | What it's about |
|---|---|---|
| Earth's spheres, energy and a warming world | 4 | Use a model of Earth's four spheres to explain how energy and carbon move around the planet, and use real data to describe how fast carbon dioxide is building up. |
| El Niño, a warming climate and the road to net zero | 4 | Explain how El Niño works and why it sits on top of long-term warming, then explain step by step how one strategy helps Australia cut its emissions. |
The universe
| Lesson | Week | What it's about |
|---|---|---|
| The Great Conspiracy: how do we know? | 5 | Find out how people measured things they could never touch, like the size of Earth, the distance to the Sun and the distance to the stars. |
| Practical: can light tell us what stars are made of? | 5 | Use a spectroscope to split light from different sources, and find out how the colours in starlight reveal what a star is made of. |
| The scale of the universe and the life of a star | 6 | Get a feel for how big the universe is, and follow a star from its birth in a cloud of gas to its death, including where the atoms in your body were made. |
| Reading the H–R diagram | 6 | Learn to read the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, the graph astronomers use to sort stars, and use it to say what kind of star something is and what it will become. |
| Redshift and the expanding universe | 6 | Use the Doppler effect and the spectral lines from our spectroscopy practical to explain how we know that the universe is expanding. |
| The big bang: evidence, timeline and the fate of the universe | 7 | Find out what the big bang theory actually says, the three main lines of evidence for it, and what the evidence suggests about how the universe will end. |
| Technology that changed our view of the universe | 7 | See how new technology has changed what we know about the universe, and learn how to critically analyse a development: its strengths, its limits and how much it changed our ideas. |
Biology revision
| Lesson | Week | What it's about |
|---|---|---|
| Revision: from DNA to Punnett squares | 7 | Refresh the big ideas of heredity (DNA, mutation, mitosis and meiosis) and practise Punnett squares for one trait until the method is automatic. |
| Revision: sex-linked traits, pedigrees and evaluating claims | 7 | Revise how X-linked traits are inherited, read pedigrees to work out genotypes and inheritance patterns, and practise evaluating a claim about inheritance. |
Curriculum
Australian Curriculum v9 Science, Year 10: AC9S10U01 (heredity), AC9S10U03 (big bang theory), AC9S10U04 (global climate change), AC9S10H02, AC9S10H03, AC9S10I05, AC9S10I08.
Diagrams on these pages are original. Simulations: PhET Interactive Simulations, University of Colorado Boulder (CC BY 4.0).