Design Technology | Chorley St Peters Church of England Primary School

Design Technology

Year 5 had a fantastic visit from Junior Stem Lego. We built programmable monkeys out of Lego and then after building them we had to use different algorithms to programme them to move, speak and play different songs. We then learned how to use sensors to control them and get them to perform different actions.

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Our DT project this term has been to design and make a pouch for the character of Zoe in our class text 'Floodland'. Zoe has a precious compass that she carries around with her and so our pouches are to hold this compass. We started by analysing different types of bags, exploring the different fastenings, construction techniques and materials used. We considered how designers have to think about the purpose of their design, who it is for and what it will be used for. We have enjoyed practising our sewing techniques on paper first before developing our technique by sewing our pouches. We are looking forward to adding the fastenings of our choice and finishing touches.

Although we have not all been in school, that hasn't stopped our work in DT. Beech class were set an inventing challenge where they had to make a working free standing rollercoaster track. They learned about inventors and how they do their job and then planned out, constructed and tested their tracks.

KS2 have been lucky to be able to take part in some DT work around the 'Design Process Box'. This was sent to us by the James Dyson Foundation and allows us to explore the job of a design engineer and to become design engineers ourselves following the same processes they use in their day to day jobs. Today we learned all about the characteristics that a design engineer shows. We knew patience and perseverance would be some of these traits, but we were surprised that frustration and wrong thinking are also considered helpful characteristics! We watched some videos where design engineers explained their job and it was interesting to find out about their pathway into this career.

In DT we have been investigating different lever and slider mechanisms. We analysed using different materials for our sliders such as card, felt, wood, cloth, string and pipe cleaners. We also tried out different bases to see which worked best. We then designed our own working slider mechanism, where we had to think carefully about the different pathways that we wanted our objects to take.