This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Design and Technology 8552. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
The material choice matters less than the subject's reputation suggests
Design and Technology looks like the hardest subject to serve from a national revision site, because every department teaches a different material and the workshop is the lesson.
The specification itself is more generous than that. AQA 8552 has three parts. Core technical principles, taken by everyone. One specialist technical principles area, chosen by the department from six: papers and boards, timber, metals and alloys, polymers, textiles, or electronic and mechanical systems. Designing and making principles, taken by everyone.
Two of those three parts are the same for every candidate in the country.
Our thirty activities divide accordingly: nine on timber, nine on core technical principles, twelve on designing and making principles. If your department teaches polymers, the nine timber activities are about somebody else's material and the other twenty-one are about your course.
That is a better position than the option problem usually leaves a resource in, and it is worth knowing before you dismiss the set.
What the twenty-one cover
Core technical principles, nine activities: new and emerging technologies and their effect on industry, energy generation and storage, modern smart and composite materials, the systems approach of input, process and output, mechanical devices including levers and linkages, and the physical and working properties that let you compare any two materials.
Designing and making principles, twelve activities: investigation with primary and secondary data, the environmental, social and economic challenge, the work of other designers and companies, design strategies and how to escape design fixation, communication through sketching and drawing conventions, orthographic projection and modelling, prototype development and evaluation, selecting materials and components, tolerances, material management and nesting, specialist tools and safety, and the wastage, addition, deforming and reforming processes.
Those last two lists are the ones examiners complain about most, because they are the parts of the course a workshop teaches by doing rather than by telling, and students often cannot put words to what they have been doing all year.
The arithmetic
D&T has more calculation in it than most people expect, and AQA examines it: gear ratios and mechanical advantage, tolerances and their upper and lower limits, percentage waste and nesting efficiency, costing, and scale.
Twenty-nine of the thirty activities include a question where the student types a value rather than picking one, which closes the elimination route four options always leave. Gear ratios, levers and tolerances each get an activity of their own.
Twenty of those prompts name the operation in words, so most rehearse the calculation rather than the choice of calculation. That is a real limit on how far these take a student, and it is the reason to follow them with a past paper question rather than to finish on them.
The timber nine
If you are a timber department, these are the nine: selecting timber materials, forces and stresses with lamination, ecological and social footprint, sources, seasoning and conversion, working with timber tools and techniques, stock forms, types and sizes, commercial processes and quality control, surface finishes, and scales of production.
If you are not, Edexcel GCSE Design and Technology is the other board's course and has the same structural choice to make, which that page describes.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
What this page does not do
Nothing for the NEA, which is half the qualification. The contextual challenge is released in June and the folder is your department's work.
Nothing for five of the six specialist materials. Nine activities assume timber.
No sustained design thinking. These check that the vocabulary and the principles are there. Putting them together into a designed outcome is what your lessons do.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.