The Benowa State High School science program seeks to develop an understanding of key concepts within each scientific discipline.
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Earth Science
- Physics
A major emphasis of the course is to empower the students to independently explore the world around them from a scientific perspective. This is facilitated through the acquisition of knowledge and the development of effective scientific and communication skills as well as problem solving strategies. Students examine how scientific knowledge in each disciple change as new evidence becomes available or old evidence is re-interpreted.
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines. Among the most important topics are five unifying principles that can be said to be the fundamental axioms of modern biology:
- Cells are the basic unit of life.
- >New species and inherited traits are the product of
evolution.
- Genes are the basic unit of heredity.
- An organism regulates its internal environment to maintain a stable and constant condition.
- Living organisms consume and transform energy.
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of atomic matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds.
Chemistry is sometimes called the central science because it connects physics with other natural sciences such as geology and biology. Chemistry is a branch of physical science but distinct from physics.
Earth Sciences
Earth and Environmental Science is an interdisciplinary topic that provides opportunities for students to engage with the dynamic interactions in and between four systems: geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. Students will draw on a number of concepts in other fields of Science, as well as a wide range of investigative skills, in order to gain an understanding of natural phenomena of our Earth and the universe.
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through space-time, along with related concepts such as energy and force more broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.
Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Over the last two millennia, physics was a part of natural philosophy along with chemistry, certain branches of mathematics, and biology, but during the scientific revolution in the 16th century, the natural sciences emerged as unique research programs in their own right. Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, and the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics often explain the fundamental mechanisms of other sciences, while opening new avenues of research in areas such as mathematics and philosophy.