Produced in 1992, this Department for Education and Science and HM Inspectorate document evaluates the response of schools to the National Curriculum requirements for technology since its introduction in 1990. The report is based on the inspection of 884 schools: 438 secondary, 25 middle, 398 primary and 23 special...

Produced in 1993, this National Curriculum Council document was written to respond to the Secretary of State for Education’s proposals to address issues with the National Curriculum for technology at the time.

The key responses to the proposals include:
*The scope of ‘technology’– clarifying the...

Following the establishment of the 1989/90 National Curriculum for Design and Technology, the Secretary of State for Education and Science and Secretary of State for Wales made proposals regarding the revision of the National Curriculum for Design and Technology.

The key proposals were:
*the number of...

Produced in 1982, this Department for Education and Science and HM Inspectorate booklet describes some aspects of technological studies in 90 schools in England and Wales. It gives information about the structure, content and organisation of courses in technology, and about some other ways in which schools...

In this activity, learners will work in groups to share their knowledge of the use of technology in sport. They will each give a 60 second presentation about the topic to their group.

This resource could be used as a starter activity or as part of an exercise for learners to develop their knowledge of how...

Written the year after the introduction of the National Curriculum, this report from the Department of Education and Science specifies the Attainment Targets expected of students at all stages of compulsory education in technology. Programmes of Study are described, along with examples of work that students could...

This report, published in 1992 by the Engineering Council, gives an analysis of the development of technology in schools, identifying the problems associated with it at the time.

The report considers how technology fits into the National Curriculum, looks at problems concerning perceived parity with other...

This CS4FN activity from the team at Queen Mary University of London highlights some issues encountered during the design of human-computer interfaces (HCI). It acts as an introduction to HCI, introducing the need to translate problems and to understand how people behave.

The activities include a robot...

This resource, aimed at primary level, links to work on light and Earth and Space. Looking first at the principles behind how a telescope works, it provides activities in which children explore the nature of light, the role of concave and convex lenses in focussing light to form an image and on making a ‘Home TV’....

In this activity, children learn that a shooting star or meteor is a piece of rock that lights up as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere. They also work scientifically to investigate how craters are formed when a meteor...

Produced by ARKive, these materials include a series of activities that introduce children to the plants and animals of the temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (USA). Children conduct a hands-on investigation of the living things in a small local ecosystem, catalogue their findings and then compare their...

This resource contains eight instant maths ideas, designed to provide students with the opportunity to investigate which polyominoes tessellate, which triangles tessellate, which quadrilaterals tessellate, design their own shape that tessellates and find tessellating patterns in art and nature. Student resource...

This resource provides an activity idea and a recording sheet for testing how sound travels away from a source. In the activity children learn to recognise that the sound heard from a source gets fainter as the distance from the source increases.

This resource has been provided by Sigma Science.

Linked to this series of resources on designing and making a car, this activity evaluates the performance of the vehicle previously manufactured by the pupils. It involves recording the time taken by each vehicle to go down a slope. This can be converted into the speed of the vehicle. It could be used at key stage...