This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Engineering 8852. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
A subject taught at a machine and examined on paper
Engineering at GCSE has a problem that Design and Technology shares and most other subjects do not. The learning happens with a tool in hand, and the assessment happens with a pen.
A student who can set up a lathe, braze a joint and read a drawing may still lose marks for not knowing that the process they used is called deforming, or that the test they ran is destructive, or the word for the tolerance they worked to. The knowledge is in their hands and not in their vocabulary.
These fifteen activities work on the vocabulary and the order of things, which is exactly the part a written paper can reach and the part a workshop course most often leaves implicit.
Materials get four activities: metals and alloys, polymers and composites, material selection with energy production, and the processes that remove and shape material. Casting, joining and finishing has its own. Systems get three: mechanical, electrical and electronic, and structural and pneumatic. Then testing methods and quality control, aerodynamics, the impact of modern technologies, drawing conventions, CAD, CAM and CNC, and production planning.
The calculation strand is thinner than the paper's
Worth being direct about. AQA examines applied mathematics in this subject: densities, forces, stress and strain, gear ratios, electrical values, tolerances.
One activity carries the core of that, on density, stress and strain. Twelve typed-number questions are distributed across the rest of the set, four of which name the operation in words.
One sixteen-minute activity is not a lot for a strand the examiner keeps returning to. If your class is weak on the arithmetic rather than the vocabulary, this set will not fix it, and past papers will serve you better.
Everything is sixteen minutes
Every activity here runs sixteen minutes, with thirteen or fourteen steps. There is no variation at all.
That is convenient for planning and limiting in use. A topic that deserves half a lesson gets the same treatment as one that deserves five minutes, and when a class genuinely has not understood pneumatics there is nothing deeper to set.
Building a sprint from three or four related activities is the practical way round it, and it gives you one link to share rather than three.
The digital half gets named
Two activities are worth pointing out because they cover ground that older engineering resources tend to skip.
Engineering drawing conventions covers what the lines, views and symbols actually mean, which students often work out by imitation without ever being taught the rules.
CAD, CAM and CNC fundamentals covers the modern production chain, from a model to a toolpath to a machine, and how that changes what a one-off costs against a batch.
Both are examinable and both are the sort of thing a department teaches by demonstrating rather than by naming.
Departments running Engineering alongside Design and Technology will find AQA GCSE Design and Technology covers overlapping process content from the design side.
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. 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.
Thin on calculation, as described above.
No practical judgement. Knowing that a process is called sand casting is not the same as knowing when to choose it, and the written paper asks both.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.