In the year of the CD-Rom, the main crowd puller for talks and discussions at this month’s meeting of the Association for Science Education in Lancaster was the huge range of multi-media products on show. Almost everyone seems to be trying to get in on the act.

Bradford Technology Ltd (BTL) was one of the earliest companies to enter this field and it continues to produce a steady stream of new CD-Roms. Its newest title, Forces and Effects, will be available to schools very soon for around Pounds 99.

AVP from Chepstow, which is well known to schools for marketing and distributing software from many sources, has now entered the fray with an excellent new product called Picturebase. This is essentially a collection of hundreds of pictures with text on CD-Rom with the possibility for students and teachers to form their “own scrapbook” from them. An entire collection of World Habitats is available this month for Pounds 99, with UK Habitats on another disc coming in February at the same price. Look out for this series of discs which will be invaluable for students and teachers of life and living processes. The AVP catalogue is well worth having anyway, because it lists many of the CD-Roms for schools.

Anglia TV will have two more science CD-Roms to add to its list early this year with The World’s Weather and Understanding Energy, both at Pounds 50 and for the Acorn platform only.

The theme of energy has been taken up by the organisation Understanding Electricity, which has produced a neatly-packaged CD entitled Sources of Energy, complete with curriculum materials at Pounds 50 a price which seems to be the median for discs at present.

Nelson Multimedia has added Land and Air and Materials to its list and both look to be good value at Pounds 99.99. A slightly different use of compact discs is provided for biologists by Education Interactive, which has produced a Photo-CD Resource Pack containing over 200 samples of “professional microscopy” on one disc. The beauty of this system is that the entire kit of Photo CD player, leads and disc can be bought for Pounds 199.99, leaving the teacher with just the monitor to provide.

Publisher Stanley Thornes is producing Images of Biology in a similar vein, with over 50 light micrographs, but also sound and text. This strikes me as yet another useful application of CD technology to go along with the entertainment, simulation, database and tutorial uses that now exist.

Few discs as yet have genuine interactivity in the sense of making the learner actually do something requiring active thought, but Cambridge Science Media has come up with a glowing example of an interactive disc which other multimedia producers would do well to examine. Its new Motion disc, following on from the award-winning Laserdisc version, is out now at Pounds 55 and deserves a full review in itself.

Enough of the multimedia which seems to be on display at every turn: new equipment for those who prefer to handle objects other than mice was on display from Pasco Scientific, Philip Harris, Unilab, Economatics, Data Harvest and many others.

Pasco was displaying its new light track at Pounds 189, which includes a four-way light source, lenses and holders and a viewing screen. It also has a new mini-launcher and a ripple tank in its 1995 catalogue coming out in early February.

Harris has a new wind generator, a solar buggy and a hand generator set for those who wish to show renewable sources of energy clearly and memorably. If you wish to go higher, Ripmax now produces a range of rockets at reasonable prices and its well-written support materials illustrate just how much science can be taught through rocketry rather than wizardry.

Similarly low-priced resources continue to emerge from Molehill Press, which has now added a collection of mathematical instruments at only Pounds 8 to its scissors and paste range of hands-on equipment for the science teacher.

Data logging is now a well-established part of the ASE exhibitions, even if it is not yet widespread in schools. Unilab has an intelligent light gate kit on sale at Pounds 190, while Data Harvest (the group name for Educational Electronics) has applied its data-logging expertise to the Acorn Pocket Book to produce PocketSac Sense, which offers snapshot logging and the ability to set up Sense and Control for remote data logging.

The interest in using Pocket Books and portables of all kinds in science education for data logging is now growing. Data Harvest is now working on software for timing, speed and acceleration with software for real-time graphing due later this year, making the widespread use of IT in science investigation much more likely.

Valuable support and guidance for teachers wishing to use IT in science continues to be provided by the National Council for Educational Technology and by Roger Frost of IT in Science. Both provide extensive information and activities for teachers at different stages on the IT learning curve. Economatics was showing its new approach to basic electronics Project Omega is based on a multi-project, ready-made printed circuit board which has been ingeniously designed to accept most of the single transistor projects that schools are likely to do at key stage 3. The ready-made board looks at first sight like a “follow the recipe” kit, but the Project Omega book and data sheets file reveal a thorough and well thought-out resource.

There comes a time when the science teacher needs to enjoy such real objects as the large hissing cockroach and the Giant African Land Snail. These and other fascinating animals which (like the CD-Rom) have entertainment as well as educational value, are provided by the experts in the field, Blades Biological, at reasonable prices. You can also now build your own attractive butterfly garden from a kit including live caterpillars for only Pounds 31.45 from Insect Lore, an American company with a new base at the UK’s epicentre for wildlife and concrete camels, Milton Keynes.

And finally, for those who (like me) still believe in using old-fashioned video tape rather than sex or lies in their teaching, there are some excellent packages around for 1995. Viewtech Film and Video is one of the main suppliers for schools in the UK and its new science catalogue, listing more than 300 titles, has just been published. The new year brings an exciting new series from Channel 4, entitled The New Living Body, which combines action film, modern imaging data and 3-D computer graphics. The 10-part series will be available on video for Pounds 47 from the Educational Television Company, and the short excerpts I saw indicate that it will be an excellent resource for the new post-Dearing national curriculum, as will many of items on show at the Lancaster annual meeting.