Design Technology
Intent
Learning within Design Technology stimulates creativity and imagination. It provides visual, tactile and sensory experiences and a special way of understanding and responding to the world.
Design Technology prepares pupils to participate in tomorrow’s rapidly changing technologies. Children are taught to:
- look at products to see how they work and how they are used, and ask the views of the people who use them;
- practise practical skills and tasks, such as joining, fixing and connecting;
- design and create their own products, using what they have learned .
Children are shown how to work safely using a variety of materials and tools. Learning is through practical activities and involves collaboration and problem solving.
Design Technology gives children the skills and abilities to engage positively with the designed and made world, and to harness the benefits of technology. They learn how products and systems are designed and manufactured, how to be innovative and to make creative use of a variety of resources including digital technologies, to improve the world around them.
We encourage children to become independent, creative problem-solvers and thinkers as individuals and as part of a team - making positive changes to their quality of life. We enable them to identify needs and opportunities and to respond to them by developing a range of ideas and by making products and systems.
Children are helped to develop the skills that enable them to think creatively and imaginatively to design, make and evaluate products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts. Food technology is implemented across the curriculum with children developing an understanding of where food comes from, the importance of a varied and healthy diet and how to prepare this.
Implementation
At Maidwell Primary we achieve this by:
- Teaching Design Technology regularly - children cover a Design Technology unit 3 times per year.
- Linking Design Technology as closely as possible to topics in other subject areas for the term, to ensure relevance and context.
- Teaching a predominantly skills-based curriculum, children combine practical skills with an understanding of aesthetic, social and environmental issues, as well as functions and industrial practices.
- Offering access to a range of tools and equipment.
- Re-teaching skills throughout the children’s time in school.
- Skills are revisited and honed in a spiral curriculum, which progresses in terms of depth and challenge, to build on the children’s previous learning.
- Fostering an appreciation of skill and knowledge of craftspeople and designers.
Impact
By the end of each year, children should have gained the substantive knowledge (factual knowledge about the processes of Design Technology, designers and craftspeople) and disciplinary knowledge (practical knowledge based on the actions taken to design, make and evaluate products) in the skills and core knowledge statements for that year group.
Children will have been exposed to a rich hinterland of contextual and broader knowledge, information, examples, illustrations and experiences to support their learning.