Design & Technology
104 free lessons in The School on Ai Quran, from Early Years to GCSE.
Early Years
- Joining things together
- Strong shapes
- Where food comes from
- Safe in the kitchen
- Cutting, folding and sticking
- Building something that stands up
- Wheels and moving parts
- Planning before making
- Choosing the right material
- Fastenings: buttons, zips and velcro
- Try it and fix it
- Taking something apart to see how it works
- Keeping something safe inside
- Making something to help someone
- Wrapping something neatly
- Making something that fits your head
Key Stage 1
- Design, make, evaluate
- Simple mechanisms
- Preparing food
- Structures that stand up
- Wheels and axles
- Textiles: joining fabric
- Planning a simple product on paper
- Designing for a real person's needs
- Choosing the right tool for the job
- Joining materials without sewing
- Testing your design and improving it
- Comparing your design with a real product
- Pop-up mechanisms: sliders and flaps
- Free-standing structures from paper
- Plant or animal: where food starts
- Preparing a simple no-cook snack
Key Stage 2
- Gears, pulleys and cams
- Electrical systems in products
- Programming a product
- A healthy, varied diet
- Design criteria: fit for purpose
- Strengthening, stiffening and reinforcing
- Drawing your idea clearly
- Investigating an existing product
- Choosing materials and components
- Joining, shaping and finishing
- Seasonality and where food comes from
- People and events that shaped design
- Levers and linkages
- Researching what users actually want
- How shape affects strength: tubes and beams
- Measuring and marking out accurately
- Sketching an idea quickly
- Motors and movement in products
- Circuits in series and parallel
- Taking apart a toy to see how it works
- Drawing to scale
- Comparing two similar products
- Natural and synthetic materials compared
- Safety equipment and safe workshop habits
- Programming a simple alarm system
- Testing a prototype with real users
- Cost and budget in design
- Adapting a recipe for a dietary need
- Food safety and hygiene in the kitchen
- Inventions that changed everyday life
- How packaging protects and informs
- Recycling and choosing materials responsibly
Key Stage 3
- Materials and their properties
- Manufacturing processes and scale
- Evaluating a product: users, professionals and new technology
- Sustainability and the product life cycle
- Food science and nutrition
- Designing with CAD and modelling
- Design brief and specification
- Mechanisms: levers, linkages and cams
- Electronics and control systems
- Food safety and preparation
- Metal alloys: why mixing metals changes properties
- Composite materials: combining for new properties
- One-off, batch and mass production compared
- Quality control and quality assurance
- Disassembly: learning from an existing product
- Design for manufacture
- Planned obsolescence and repairability
- Carbon footprint and material sourcing
- Types of motion in mechanisms
- Combining mechanisms in a real product
- Feedback and closed-loop control systems
- Programmable control: writing simple system logic
- Food provenance and sourcing
- Types of prototype
GCSE
- Energy generation and storage
- Systems: input, process, output
- Timbers, metals and polymers
- Testing materials, and testing with users
- Iterative design
- Core technical principles
- The NEA contextual challenge
- Making safely — and what needs a workshop
- Designing for the user and for manufacture
- Evaluating against a specification
- Specialist material principles
- Mechanical advantage and velocity ratio
- Smart materials and modern materials
- Textile construction: natural and synthetic fibres
- Forces, stresses and structural reinforcement
- Finishing techniques and surface treatments
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