Designed to make a difference!
How Engineering Educates works towards the Design & Technology Association (D&TA) vision.
February 2023 marks the release of a brand new ‘Designed for Life’ podcast, with Tony Ryan, CEO Design & Technology Association and Dr Lynne Bianchi, founder and Director of SEERIH at The University of Manchester. What’s apparent is the shared vision for enriching the engineering experiences that young people have in schools, and for this, the Engineering Educates Farmvention Challenge comes into the spotlight again.
“Design and technology should, in our opinion, be an integral component of every school’s curriculum offer” D&TA
The SEERIH team have worked closely with the National Farmers’ Union to develop a brand-new set of campaign resources that put science, design & technology, maths, and computing into context. Engineering Educates is a two-yearly campaign that integrates the application of the Engineering Design Cycle. In the Farmvention challenge, three age-related pathways provide options for teachers to inspire their 7–14-year-olds about engineering in the context of British Farming and agriculture engineering.
It was important to the writers to ensure the highest quality of teacher and pupil resources possible. They drew heavily on the inspiration of Projects on a Page, a hugely popular primary resource produced by the D&TA – providing a framework to help primary schools in England implement the National Curriculum for D&T in an imaginative yet practical way. Within the Engineering Educates Farmvention Challenge, the team have adapted the idea as ‘Problems on a Page’, which are resources that present engineering practical challenges, direct to pupils.
Tony Ryan explains that D&TA are delighted to have reviewed the resources and put their support into disseminating them to as many schools as possible. He states:
“D&T is going from strength to strength in our primary schools, with teachers utilising resources such as ‘Projects on a Page’ alongside subject training to create an ambitious and engaging curriculum offer for their students, one that includes context and progression into their planning. ”
What we like about the EngEd Farmvention Challenge is the manner in which it sets context for learning in an area where many pupils will be out of their immediate comfort zone. To tackle the problems set, they will need to investigate and explore, empathise with the problem, and then creatively use a range of techniques. This includes sketching to modelling, in order to examine and test potential solutions, learning as they go and drawing on knowledge gained in other areas of the curriculum to come up with a feasible solution to a real problem.
This approach mirrors the D&TA’s approach to reinventing the curriculum for D&T, within which pupils need to see that the problems they are being asked to solve are real, tangible, and often gnarly issues that, if thoughtfully solved, will help someone, a group, or broader society immeasurably. This approach empowers young people and assists them in being part of a solution to the many problems, environmental and otherwise, that the world currently faces.
Tony explains, that the challenge for the teaching of Design & Technology in mainstream teaching at primary and lower secondary school is that at primary level. Teachers often receive less than a day’s training in D&T as part of their initial teacher education, the majority of primary subject leaders in the subject have no STEM background, other than their experience at school, which was often varied at best. At secondary level, years of under recruitment has left the subject bereft of subject specialists at lower secondary. This sometimes results in a ‘safe’ or practical curriculum offer that concentrates more on craft than on any considered design process. As such, the D&TA continue to lobby the Government and other decision-making bodies to counteract the decline in this essential subject, which offers young people the opportunity to be imaginative, explore the world around them with a problem-solving focus and, importantly, provide rich contexts for the application of science, maths, and computer science.
“We are very proud that D&TA have endorsed the Engineering Educates Farmvention Challenge,” said Dr Bianchi.
She explains that the resources will provide teachers and pupils with a purposeful experience of STEM and take pupils’ learning further by bringing the way engineers think and solve problems to the fore. “Design and technology isn’t a bolt-on in this campaign, but an integral part of the learning process – developed in a way that pupils can fully appreciate how design is essential to the creative process within engineering.”
If you want to hear more from Tony in conversation with Lynne, visit the Designed for Life podcast
Download Engineering Educates Farmvention Teacher Resources
Soil Defenders Challenge
Cattle Careers Challenge
Sustainable Farms Challenge
For more information about the Design & Technology Association, visit www.data.org.uk
