Free KS3 Resources
‘Inspired by Industry’ is a set of design contexts to address the ever-changing needs of the Design and Technology curriculum. Rather than take a ‘project-driven approach to designing and making, they each start with a real-world design context provided by an industry partner of the Design & Technology Association.
The contexts are authentic to the companies providing them with opportunities for teachers to use these with students. All follow a common design-thinking approach shown below.
The contexts are editable and are a starting point for you to focus your teaching of Design and Technology. They feature hidden slides for teachers only and you can add and remove elements as you wish! Suggested Investigative and evaluative Activities and Focused Tasks help to structure the unit and provide opportunities to scaffold the learning of the design and make activity.
D&T Association members also have access to an extensive range of Curriculum Units that address aspects of the national curriculum such as investigation, designing, making, and evaluating and more.
Choose the units that support the aspects of D&T you wish to focus on when creating your own unique curriculum, likely including units of work you are currently teaching that work well!
Design contexts increase in challenge and/or duration for each of the KS3 years, as well as reducing the scaffolding and support as they progress through the years. This allows for more individual and innovative work to be produced.
With your contexts chosen, work through the presentation, hearing from the industry professionals, before tackling the toolkit of approaches they have just mentioned! The associated PDF document will give you further information, tips and advice on how to deliver it.
The contexts have been mapped against the D&T Progression Framework to show progression and key learning opportunities. These use codes to help with the mapping and are shown in the Excel sheet here. As you will see, not all aspects of the Progression Framework are covered yet, but could be adapted to ensure this, and will also be covered in forthcoming units released soon!
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