How do cooking and cleaning impact the air quality in our homes?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 Chemistry.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Professor Nicola Carslaw from the University of York, UK. She is investigating the pollutants and reactive chemicals released indoors by cooking and cleaning to understand how these impact our health.

• This resource also contains an interview with Nic. If your students have questions for Nic, they can send them to her online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Nic will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Nic’s research and challenges them to think about their exposure to pollution throughout the day and what action they could take to reduce this.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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