This page lists what we actually have for OCR GCSE Chemistry A, Gateway Science, J248. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Nothing here says which sum to do
Chemistry calculations have two halves. Recognising what kind of problem you are looking at, and then doing the arithmetic. The second half is Year 7 work. The first half is the examined skill and the reason students who "can do the maths" still lose the marks.
A revision question can hand over the first half without anyone noticing, simply by phrasing the prompt helpfully. "Divide the mass by the Mr to find the number of moles" leaves nothing behind but a division.
Eight questions in this set ask for a typed value, and none of them does that. Each describes a situation and stops. Gas Volume Gauntlet, Mass Matters, Inside the Atom, Nano World and The Chemical Detective all carry them.
We can be precise about how unusual that is, because the comparison is on this site. Our AQA GCSE Chemistry set names the operation in twenty-six of its forty-two prompts, which that page states as its own limitation. Two chemistry sets, built by the same pipeline, and one of them makes a class work considerably harder than the other.
Every activity, the same two demands
This set is unusually consistent in what it asks a student to do, and both things are worth having.
All fifteen contain a sentence-building step. The student assembles an explanation from parts, in order, rather than picking a finished one from a list. Chemistry explanations are chains, this happens because that happened, so it therefore does this, and a student who can recognise a correct chain often cannot produce one.
Fourteen of the fifteen contain a timed recall round against a life count, which is the opposite demand: fast, factual, no thinking time. Ion colours, gas tests, reactivity order, formulae.
Having both in one twenty-minute activity is a reasonable model of what the paper does, where a two-mark recall question sits three lines above a six-mark explanation.
Practical work has an activity
OCR does not publish a numbered list of required practicals. It defines eight Practical Activity Groups, cross-referenced against the content, with no extra taught content of their own.
One activity here reviews them, covering apparatus, control of variables, method and the reading of results. It is not a substitute for having done the work, and it is more than most revision material offers for the practical strand.
The same structure applies to OCR Gateway GCSE Biology, which has its own PAG activity.
What is covered
Particles, elements compounds and mixtures, chemical reactions, predicting and identifying reactions and products, monitoring and controlling chemical reactions, and global challenges.
Familiar chemistry ground, with the specification's own framing: OCR organises by what a chemist is doing, predicting, monitoring, controlling, rather than by traditional topic headings, and the activities follow that.
Thirteen of the fifteen run twenty minutes or more, so they are homework-sized.
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.
What this page does not do
It does not replace the lab book. The PAG activity reasons about practical work in general.
No extended writing at exam length. The written tasks ask for eighty words, a developed paragraph rather than a six-mark answer.
Almost no Higher tier signposting. One of the fifteen activities mentions Higher tier at all, so a Foundation class will meet some material they are not sitting and will not be told which.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.