GSAQ Rock and Mineral Sets

Rock and Mineral Sets for Year 11 and 12 Students

Notice – Project Currently on Hold
Current high demand has exhausted our stocks of many of the rock and mineral types used in the sets. The GSA regret to advise that at present new orders for the sets cannot be accepted until we have had a chance to replenish these stocks and assemble more sets.

To date the GSAQ have delivered more than 1,200 sets around Queensland, around Australia, and around the world! We even built three sets for Mars!

We will advise once we are set with a new set of sets with which to continue this GSA initiative.

With thanks for your support - The GSAQ Roxette Team  

The sets
Following a brief survey of secondary schools teaching Earth Science, the GSAQ implemented a project to assemble integrated rock and mineral specimen sets suitable for these classes. Indications were that while individual specimens were available from a variety of sources, there were a lack of sets containing an integrated collection of the various basic rock types, and similarly for minerals.

Currently the following sets are available –

  • Igneous Rocks (8)
  • Sedimentary Rocks (8)
  • Metamorphic Rocks (8)
  • Rock Forming Minerals (12)
  • Economic Minerals (12)
  • Moh’s Scale of Hardness (10)

The content of these sets has been derived in conjunction with Ross Wilson from the QCAA, based on the new Earth and Environmental Science curriculum from 2019.

The new specimen sets were displayed publically for the first time at the recent Science Week event at Southbank, receiving a great deal of attention, and a number of subsequent orders.

Following donations of material from a number of mining organisations, the GSAQ is currently developing a series of ‘Economic Suite’ sets, each containing both the ore and host rock sample for a particular commodity. To date these sets include –

  • Coal (8)
  • Iron ore (8)
  • Copper / Base Metals (8)

A new set of rocks is also currently being assembled containing rocks of the Brisbane area, designed to accompany Warwick Willmott’s ‘Rocks and Landscapes’ series of booklets.

The sets are heavily subsidised, with the price for each set being $27.50 including GST. As such, these sets are available only to secondary schools for their classroom use, and are not available to the general public.

 

Click here to download a list of content for the sets 

For further information on the project, and how you can assist, please contact Tony Shellshear ([email protected])