At Practical Action we are delighted that the examination board AQA have included ‘support to developing countries’ as one of their recently released contextual challenges offered to GCSE D&T students.
As an international development organisation with a focus on technology to address poverty, we are delighted that students have been given this great opportunity to complete an indepth project on such an important issue.
As an ex D&T teacher, I would be tempted myself to spend some time browsing through Practical Action’s main website, which is full of inspirational stories of how peoples’ lives have been transformed through access to technology in areas such as Renewable energy, Water and sanitation and Food and agriculture.
For those of you that like to find out more of the technical details behind the projects, we have a wide range of technical briefs and publications that provide technical information to support the international project work.
Support for GCSE students
As a starter activity I would be tempted to inspire them to choose a development context by running a mini hands-on STEM challenge this term. Any of the STEM Challenges are good, but the Stop The Spread and/or the Squashed Tomato challenges are most suitable for Yr10 students and quickly introduce them to how life changing technology can be.
As for your students needing to identify particular clients and stakeholders for their product research and development, I’d suggest these top three FREE downloadable materials make good starting points on Practical Action’s School’s site.
- Global Goals – introduces the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (also known as Goals Global) that highlight a set of targets to reduce/end world poverty by 2030. Many of the Global Goals including Water and Sanitation, Climate Action, Sustainable Cities have targets whereby technology plays an important role.
- Global Project Ideas – a set of five sheets that set out some of the biggest global challenges and a wide range of issues/problems for which technology can play a significant role.
- Design For A Better World – a designed based activity enabling students to think of the technologies and product we need in the future to meet the Global Goal targets.
We hope these materials help you and your students to feel inspired to choose a development theme for their GCSE project. Please get in touch if we can be of further help [email protected]