This page lists what we actually have for OCR GCSE Biology A, Gateway Science, J247. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
The practical activity that usually is not there
Science specifications examine practical work in a way that revision resources find awkward. The questions are about apparatus a student handled months ago, a variable somebody else controlled, a repeat reading that was discarded and why.
OCR structures this differently from AQA. Instead of a numbered list of required practicals, there are eight Practical Activity Groups, cross-referenced against the content topics, with no additional taught content of their own. A student is expected to have done work in each group and to be able to reason about it.
One of these sixteen activities reviews those groups. It works through the apparatus, the control of variables, the shape of a method and the reading of results, at twenty-two minutes.
That is not the same as having been in the lab, and it does not replace your students' own books. It is, however, substantially more than most revision material offers, and more than this site offers for other science specifications: our AQA Combined Science Trilogy activities mention a required practical in four of forty-nine, which that page says plainly.
Three activities where students point rather than name
Biology has a category of knowledge that written questions test badly: knowing where something is.
A student can learn that the loop of Henle reabsorbs water, that the retina contains rods and cones, that Broca's area is in the frontal lobe, and still be unable to find any of them on a diagram. The words and the picture are stored separately until something forces them together.
Three activities use a hotspot to force it: Kidney Control, Eye Spy and Brain Box. The student clicks the structure on an image. There is no list to eliminate from, and a student who does not know where it is cannot get there by reasoning about the other options.
Cell Explorer does the same job with a labelled diagram, and carries two typed-number questions on magnification, which is the calculation students are most likely to attempt backwards.
The calculations are genuinely demanding
Eleven questions ask the student to type a value, and only one of those prompts names the operation.
That is the best ratio of any science set on this site. Elsewhere a prompt often says "divide the mass by the volume" and leaves the student with a division to perform. Here the question describes the situation and the student has to work out that this is a magnification problem, or a rate, or a percentage change.
Working out which calculation applies is what the paper asks. A resource that supplies it has made the question easier in exactly the way the exam will not.
What is covered
Cell level systems, scaling up, organism level systems, community level systems, genes inheritance and selection, and global challenges, plus the practical skills strand.
Fifteen of the sixteen run twenty minutes or more, so these are homework-sized rather than starter-sized. Every one of them contains a timed recall round against a life count, so a student gets the fast knowledge check and the slower reasoning in the same sitting.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
The same board's chemistry is at OCR Gateway GCSE Chemistry, and the other board's biology at AQA GCSE Biology.
What this page does not do
It does not replace the lab book. The PAG activity reasons about practical work in general; your students' own results are the thing the exam questions hang off.
No extended writing at exam length. The written tasks here ask for eighty words, which is a developed paragraph rather than a six-mark answer.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.