Beijing's Best Dressed Balconies

Over the past term Year 8 Design and Technology students have been designing and making Balcony Spinners.

The Balcony Spinners are personalised and intended to brighten up a Balcony (or Garden) and to spin around when it is windy.

The spinners were first designed on paper, before being reproduced on 2D Design Software. Students then used the Laser Cutting machine to cut out the plastic blades before piecing them together.

Students then set about making the bracket (holder) completely by hand, using workshop tools and equipment to help them.

Here we can see how well ‘I’, ‘K’ and ‘F’ have managed to replicate their initial ‘hand drawn design’

A sucker for a good project 2016

I blogged last school year about a great little project that i’d designed and implemented, based on the fact that a lot of our students live in rented accommodation and / or are unable to attach any permanent fittings within their bathrooms and kitchens etc.

I feel that the suction cup toothbrush holder is a great project which encapsulates and taps into some of the cultural background of my students.

This year, students have done the project as an introduction to Techsoft 2D Design (as many of them are new to the school or to the subject this year).

D&T Teaching in China

At a time when design and technology teachers fear for the future of their subject, one of the world’s education superpowers, China, has turned to the UK to learn how to teach the subject in its schools.

Just last week, David Baker, director of the charity Design Education, claimed in TES that the subject of D&T was “dying” because fewer students were choosing the subject and fewer people were training to teach it.

Despite D&T teachers’ concerns over the subject’s demise in the UK, however, the Chinese have asked for their help in training staff to teach it, as the country attempts to adopt a more creative approach to education in its schools. A delegation of UK teachers with the Design and Technology Association (DTA) flew out to China 10 days ago.

Richard Green, chief executive of the DTA, said the Chinese government believed its culture was too “risk averse”, something that it hoped to change through its schools.

“They perform very well in [international education] league tables, but what they are not good at is having the creativity to apply that knowledge,” Mr Green said. “They said that the back of an [Apple] iPhone says ‘designed in California, assembled in China’ – what they want is for it to say ‘designed and made in China’.”

He added that the fact that China wanted to learn from the UK to help them achieve such a goal should act as a warning that the subject of D&T was essential to the future of this country.

“If they are looking at us to help them then we really need to be wide awake to what that means and we must stay ahead of the game. If we have a curriculum that is seen as world-leading we should be protecting it and developing it,” Mr Green said.

In TES last week, Mr Baker wrote that the number of students sitting a D&T GCSE this summer fell for the 10th year in a row to a little over 200,000. Similarly, the number of teachers in the subject has also plummeted, with the government attracting fewer than half the teachers it needs to teach the subject this year.

“This is no temporary blip – it is the decimation of an entire generation of one subject’s teachers,” Mr Baker writes