 Hi, I'm Joe Hope, I'm a professor of physics at the Research School of Physics at A&U, and I started Meristem to help share the same style of resources that we use in the tertiary space with secondary students. Scientific ideas tend to build on one another, so a deeper understanding of one set of material helps you with this week's test, but it also helps you understand the next week's material, the next year's material, and all future tests as well. The main idea is to use Meristem resources to listen to your first explanation on a new topic at home in your own time, and then you can use class time to get more help when you actually need it, when you're doing things, when you're working on activities, and so you get support from your mates and your teacher working through the material and trying to understand. And the science skills module can help you if you get stuck. The universe is a large and complicated place, and understanding it better has been humans' special trick. Over the last few millennia, we've developed some important tools to help us understand the world better, including basic things like education and writing, and the idea of mathematics and numbers and logic and philosophy. But over the last few centuries, we've had a particular advantage where we widely adopted the scientific method. Scientific method is basically just using evidence whenever you have an assertion, and so we don't blindly follow authority, and we also don't blindly follow our own assumptions. We go out and look for evidence for any statement we think about making, or we make it, and then we go out and look for evidence. And usually that evidence comes down to making some kind of measurement, and so measurement is central to all science. Most measurements, when you look at the world very precisely, come down to a number, and that number is associated usually with a unit that tells you what physical quantity you're measuring. Numbers are useful, and we have all sorts of tools for impelating them that can become statistics or graphs or formulae that can be represented by letters when we haven't measured them yet, and we can still process them in various ways, and in science we also learn methods of dealing with numbers that are too tiny or too big to even write down normal ways. The Science Skills module is a series of chapters that help you use numbers like a scientist. It will be useful to you in various subjects, and you can either go through it in one big hit, or you can dip in and out as you find that you need to learn or revise a particular topic. Meristem presenters are all volunteers and experts in their fields. We have university professors, great teachers, and even students all contributing to try and share their passion for their subject with you and help you get the most out of your school.