ABSTRACT
Scientific ideas are powerful ideas because they give students specialised ways of thinking about the world that they otherwise would not acquire through their everyday lives. These ideas are equally relevant to students who want to go on and work in science as they are for those who want to live with an appreciation of science. In this chapter, the author introduces 13 scientific ideas that stress the most conceptually important aspects of science for students and teachers at school. Acquiring an understanding of these ideas forms a major goal of science education and is reliant on students acquiring and connecting together lots of related knowledge bounded in concepts that are introduced and built upon in a logical way. Powerful ideas are a bit like a story in that we can't hope to understand them simply by reading their title.
