Secondary project briefs (ages 11+)

Bronze Awards are typically completed by students aged 11+. They complete a ten-hour project which is a perfect introduction to STEM project work. Over the course of the project, teams of students design their own investigation, record their findings, and reflect on their learnings. This process gives students a taste of what it is like to be a scientist or engineer in the real-world.

Silver Awards are typically completed by students aged 14+ over thirty hours. Project work at Silver level is designed to stretch your students and enrich their STEM studies. Students direct the project, determining the project’s aim and how they will achieve it. They carry out the project, record and analyse their results and reflect on the project and their learnings. All Silver projects are assessed by CREST assessors via our online platform.

Gold Awards are typically completed by students aged 16+ over seventy hours. Students’ projects are self-directed, longer term and immerse them in real research. At this level, we recommend students work with a mentor from their chosen STEM field of study. All Gold projects are assessed by CREST assessors via our online platform. There are more CREST approved resources that have been developed by our partners and providers specific to your region.

There are more CREST approved resources that have been developed by our partners and providers specific to your region.

Find out how to build practical CREST projects into secondary science lessons using our free teacher guidance pack. Supporting this guidance are easy-to-use, free-to-download mapping workbooks, which match individual Bronze, Silver and Gold CREST Award projects with each area of the secondary science curricula for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. You can download and save your own copy of the relevant mapping workbook via the following links:

To browse the briefs, click the buttons below or scroll down.

Bronze Silver Gold Partner resources

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Fruit juice or fizzy drinks

Investigate if fruit juices are really healthier than fizzy drinks. This resource is published under an Attribution - non-commercial - no derivatives 4.0 International creative commons licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). For more information visit our Terms and Conditions (www.crestawards.org/terms-and-conditions).

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Page 1 of 2 Fruit juice or fizzy drinks? Fizzy drinks are considered unhealthy due to their high sugar content and the amount of additives they contain. On the other hand, fruit juices are often seen as a healthy alternative and of greater nutritional value. In this project you are going to carry out quantitative experiments to determine the concentration of some of the ingredients of these two types of drinks. Using your results, you will decide what the health benefits or risks are from drinking them and publish your findings for a particular target audience. Getting Started Choose a range of products to analyse., including a range of fizzy drinks and pure fruit juice. Some tests to try are: Perception of sweetness. Many fizzy drinks contain artificial sweeteners whereas pure fruit juices are naturally sweetened. Devise an experiment to compare the relative sweetness of artificial and natural sweeteners. This could involve carrying out taste tests with dissolved solutions of the sweeteners found in fizzy drinks and the natural sugars found in fruit juices, comparing sweetness and other taste differences. Determining reducing sugars concentration: You could use a test strip to provide a semi- quantitative result. For more accurate results, try using a compound called 3,5- dinitrosalicylate. When added to a solution containing reducing sugars, DNS is reduced to a compound called ANS, which is a red colour. The density of this colour varies depending on the concentration of reducing sugars, this density value can be measured using a colorimeter. Click to edit project description Determining the amino acids present by chromatography: Which drink contains the most essential amino acids? Determining the effect of fizzy drinks and fruit juices on tooth decay: Extracted teeth can be sourced from dentists and left in drinks to study their effect. Publishing your findings: Illustrate the findings and conclusions from your experiments and research work in a poster or information leaflet which is aimed at a particular target audience. Things to think about Think about who the most appropriate target audience could be for your findings. This could be children and teenagers who frequently drink fizzy drinks or parents who want to decide what drinks are best to buy for their children. Useful Resources You are unlikely to have some of the required equipment at your school or college, however you could approach a local university to see if you could use their facilities. Some additional tests to try are: Caffeine content: Carry out research into the caffeine content of the drinks you are investigating. You need to use a technique called High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) to determine the amount of caffeine in a substance. Antimicrobial effects of caffeine: It is claimed that caffeine can prevent microbial growth. Carry out a further experiment to investigate this claim. Test the antimicrobial activity of different concentrations of caffeine solution against different concentrations of other anti-microbials to determine If caffeine is more effective than other anti-microbials at any concentration, and at what concentration caffeine has the most antimicrobial effect.