Skills you learn from Design & Technology (Year 9)

Design & Technology builds a distinctive set of skills - designing for users within real constraints, visual analysis, practical fluency across materials and tools, iterative making, and self-direction. This lesson plan will help you to show Year 9 students the skills they're building from Design & Technology.

This lesson is designed to be delivered in 30 minutes as a teacher-led classroom activity.

This activity supports the following frameworks:

  • Gatsby Benchmark 4

This activity is suitable for Year 9 and features careers linked to the following subjects:

  • Design and Technology

This is one of three lesson plans designed for Year 9 Design & Technology teachers:

These lesson plans will help you show students how Design & Technology connects to their future careers.

We recommend using this lesson plan at the end of the autumn term. By this point students will have a term of Design & Technology behind them, giving them real material to reflect on when thinking about the skills they've been building. Recognising those skills helps students see Design & Technology as more than a subject to study, and sets them up for GCSE choices in the spring.

Learning objectives

  • Students will understand that Design & Technology builds a broad range of transferable skills.
  • Students will be able to name 2-3 skills they've developed this term and give examples.

Before the lesson

  • You will need a computer connected to the internet and a classroom screen.
  • Open the What can you do with Design & Technology? page and have it ready on the screen.
  • Review the Skills that Design & Technology builds section and think of teaching examples for each one.

During the lesson

1. What have we studied this term? (5 mins)

  • Ask students to call out projects, pieces, or techniques they've worked on in Design & Technology this term.
  • Write the suggestions on the board and highlight any patterns.

2. Skills that Design & Technology builds (15 mins)

  • Bring up the What can you do with Design & Technology? page on the classroom screen.
  • Review the contents of the page with students so that they understand what it covers.
  • Scroll to the Skills that Design & Technology builds section and work through each skill in turn.
    • Ask students which project or piece from the board involved that skill.
    • Share your own teaching examples if students are stuck.

3. Making it personal (10 mins)

  • Ask students to pick 2-3 skills from the list they feel they've developed this term.
  • Go round the class, asking each student to name one skill and give an example of when they used it.
  • Close by reminding students that these are valuable skills for work and life, not just for exams.

After the lesson