Collect

The Collect package of resources supports students to try out user-centred design principles,  helping them to collect information about their chosen theme for the V&A Innovate challenge. The resources encourage students to explore, listen to people, observe and uncover everything they need to know to help...

Getting started

This collection of Getting Started resources will help you to set up the V&A Challenge with your students. Getting Started focuses your students on establishing a design team. The downloadable resources provide ideas for mini team challenges that your students can take part in to help them begin their creative...

WEAR: what we wear, how it's made and its impact on the world

WEAR asks us to investigate the issues of the fashion industry. Are we too wasteful, throwing clothes away once they've been worn a few times? Do we care who's making our clothing and how much they're being paid? How does our clothing represent who we are and what we have to say?

What if we could all...

EAT: what we eat, how and where it comes from

EAT asks us to explore human food habits. How do we give more people access to affordable, healthy food? What can we do to ensure that our food production is sustainable, and that we aren't wasting or polluting the planet with too much packaging? Can a design idea encourage people to make better food choices?

GO: how we travel, why and where we go

GO asks us to consider the big questions facing human movement. How can we increase global travel without polluting our planet? How do we bring people from different countries closer together? What are the challenges to our everyday mobility?

How might we redesign everyday objects to make travelling...

Exploring the circular economy

The following lesson plans provide a good introduction to the circular economy, and can be taught in sequence or as stand-alone lessons.

The lessons plans include:

• (1/5) Challenging common conceptions
• (2/5) Exploring the circular economy
• (3/5)...

Robots and artificial intelligence AI: lessons in the ethics of robots

This resource supports students to research and discuss the field of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). The resource provides a series of student tasks that explore the topic of whether robots are a threat to humanity. This resource would work well as a research topic for students undertaking projects in...

A teachers guide to disruptive technologies

This guide to disruptive technologies provides ideas and rationale for why disruptive technologies should be taught as part of the Design and Technology secondary and post-16 curriculum. It provides examples of disruptive technologies, discusses how they might be introduced in a classroom setting and supports in...

Moja Island Renewable Energy Engineering

From Practical Action, this 1-2 hour class activity uses the supply of energy for an island community to help students to understand renewable energy options.

Where's the impact?

This resource looks at life-cycle analysis and how it is used to work out the environmental impact of different products.