PSJ Primary children have enjoyed doing some whole school Design Technology experiences. These experiences, beyond the DT lessons, give PSJ children the opportunity to explore their creative and critical thinking skills and demonstrate what dynamic designers they are!
For the last two years, our children have created Christmas cards which have linked to our ‘big ideas’ in DT. These incorporated moving parts such as levers and linkages with progressing complexity through the year groups. The cards demonstrated some of the skills that are practised in DT lessons and were taken home to families and given to members of our community.
A Design Technology day was held last year where classes engaged in fun, practical tasks revolved around all aspects of the Design Cycle – getting ideas, designing, making and evaluating. Some highlights of the day included bridge and tower building competitions, making water containers out of paper and finding a way to protect a Rich Tea surviving a trip through the Royal Mail! Children also considered solutions to real life global problems.
PSJ Primary has participated in a national engineering competition called If You Were an Engineer What Would You Do? This has been a wonderful way to expose children to the world of engineering and appreciate the qualities, such as our care values of curiosity and resilience, needed by engineers as they design and make products to solve problems. This is an exciting competition where children design a product that solves a problem, and write to engineers to propose that their design gets made into a prototype.
In 2023, PSJ submitted almost 200 entries. The judges were very impressed with the quality of our submissions and we were delighted to have a number of highly commended award winners as well as three overall winners from our school. These winners were selected from many hundreds of entries and went through two rounds of judging by engineers, so this was a fantastic achievement for PSJ. The winning design was a watch that will tell others when a person is feeling anxious and may need help. Our winners were given their awards at a ceremony at the University of West England (UWE).
This year we have more than doubled our submissions and there are some very innovative and unique inventions created by children from Reception through to Year 6. We are looking forward to seeing the judges’ responses to our entries.
Gracie 2023 Winner South West with her winning Worry Watch design.
2023 Highly commended award winners Louie and Cara