Product Design:
It’s Spring Term and our Year 7 Product Designers have been busy completing their bird feeders. Their products have been made with timber (Pine) with an acrylic roof, using many tools such as tenon saws, files and machinery such as the Pillar Drill and the Disc Sander. We’ve learnt how to mark out the dimensions for our products, about timber joints, different types of timber and how we need to be environmentally mindful when making our products. We’re now stepping things up to think about how designers design products and finding out how we can draw up our own designs using 3D drawing techniques such as Isometric drawing and 2 point perspective. In Year 8 we’ve also been focussing on using timber for our products with the steady hand game. Along with practising our tools and machinery skills, we’ve been creating electric circuits in our products so that the buzzer goes off when the metal handle comes into contact with the wire on the game. We’ll soon be moving on to focus on learning about Polymers and another exciting new project to go with it. Year 9 are learning to work with metals and polymers whilst making their torches. They’ve enjoyed soldering the circuits in the torches together and will soon be able to take their projects home to use. Over in GCSE Year 10, it’s been a busy time making colour changing lamps using acrylic and timber, and focussing on building our working with timber skills whilst making our pine easels. The easels have tested our making skills by including numerous different types of timber joint. We’ve been learning all about timber as the specialist material for our GCSE and everyone is looking forward to starting our next project which is a practice design, make, evaluate project based on a Non Examined Assessment mock (NEA). Year 11’s have almost completed their NEA work and are beginning to see all the hard work they have been doing for the past year coming to fruition, with some amazing product prototypes to show. Well Done Year 11
Engineering:
Within Design and Technology we also teach BTEC Level 1&2 Engineering. So what is engineering? Engineering
is people using their creativity and problem-solving skills to improve the design and performance of everything we use today and to develop the products and processes of the future. Our Yr10 engineers have been looking at the wide world of engineering and manufacturing, learning what goes into the manufacture of an engineered product and how companies big and small work together to produce everything we use in our daily lives, from aeroplanes through to vacuum cleaners. They have also been learning the basics of manufacturing by working through a series of practical activities, shown in the photo below. The adjustable spanner is the culmination of these activities which should leave them with a tool that they can use for the rest of their lives.
The Yr 11 engineers have been busy preparing for their practical and written exams this term. The practical exam consisted of a data gathering activity, which the students then had to present and interpret. The written exam was a product analysis and development task that tested their wider knowledge of design and manufacturing.