Practical Project / Design-and-Make Coursework
This domain tests the evidence you produce while designing and making a product for a real user. Assessment rewards an iterative, documented process: investigation, specification, design development, making with control of accuracy and safety, testing, and evaluation. The final artefact matters, but so does the record of decisions.
Core rules
- Work from a real client or user. Record their needs, your questions and their feedback at more than one stage.
- Keep the brief and specification live documents. If testing changes a requirement, annotate the change and the reason.
- Show a range of concepts, then develop one with models, CAD, mock-ups or material trials. Development should show measurable improvement.
- Plan making: sequence operations, list tools and materials, write risk assessments, and identify jigs, templates and quality checks.
- Evaluate against specification points using evidence such as dimensions, load tests, user trials and photographs. Recommend further development.
Worked example
A coursework lamp for a desk: sequence marking out, cutting the base, drilling cable holes with a drill jig, joining, finishing, wiring and electrical safety testing. Quality checks include base squareness against a try square, hole spacing against the jig, and continuity and earthing checks before use. A user trial tests glare and reach. Evaluation records that the joint met the squareness check but the cable route failed the bend-radius requirement, so the design is revised. Reasoning: each claim is tied to a test and a specification point.
Traps
- Backfilling evidence: writing the evaluation before the tests and inventing results.
- Showing only one idea, so development cannot be assessed.
- Ignoring workshop safety or omitting risk assessments.
- Evaluating only appearance, with no measurements or user evidence.