Middle School Design

The Design team have been working hard this term on refining established programmes and starting some new programmes. In Year 8, students are now well into their work on their main creation assessment across the various Design areas with some very creative and interesting ideas developing nicely. The Year 8 Digital Design class have been designing their own electronic systems to aid a client around the home or garden. With three weeks left to create their prototypes, students have almost finished the building and now need to get their programming finalised. We have been using an Arduino microcontroller as the brains behind their new idea then additional sensors and outputs have been added to achieve the desired end product. The complexity of some of the ideas has been very impressive.

The first Year 7 Design rotations finished in Week 2 this term with a quick scientific evaluation of their CO2 dragster racing cars. Students test the cars speed, weight and various specifications to gain some data. They can then use this data to predict the speed of other cars based on its characteristics. This STEM based learning approach is now imbedded throughout the various Materials Design programmes in Year 6, 7 and 8.

Mr Edward Grant
Middle School Design