The ins and outs of the pharmaceutical industry
The award-winning ABPI Resources for Schools website, supported by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, is packed full of high quality resources. I confess the first time I heard of this site was when it won the Best Online Education prize at the 2016 UK Association Awards. The site contains around 50 easy-to-use resources developed to support teaching, learning and careers around the pharmaceutical industry.
The site allows you to filter down to the age range you are teaching, giving you suitable resources listed in categories. It is very biology heavy but for the chemistry teacher there are a few resources of note. These are all excellent and definitely worthy of use. Each resource is like a huge cavern containing plenty of detail and information about the topic, along with a number of other resources for both teachers and students alike. For example, the A-level resource Making medicines starts with a funky timeline of events in the lifetime of a drug from which you can delve into every single aspect of drug development across nine further sections each containing yet more resources.
Supporting each resource is a vast library of downloadable items for classroom teachers to use. This is something I wish more sites offered as it allows us to take any resource into the classroom with or without internet access and easily adapt it for our own purposes. Also, because the site offers a couple of different formats to download, you can usually find something that will work for your needs.
The versatility of the site is exceptional, and as well as providing resources for your own teaching you could easily set pupils a task and let them loose to explore it on their own.
The pharmaceutical industry in the UK contributes around £8.4 billion to the UK’s GDP and employs a huge number of people. It’s therefore a viable career option for any budding young scientist, and it’s great that the ABPI have created this website to support teaching and learning around the pharmaceutical industry.
www.abpischools.org.uk
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