This page lists what we actually have for OCR GCSE Art and Design, J170 to J175. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Five themes and one decision
OCR's externally set task arrives as a choice. Five themes, and a candidate picks one.
It is easy to underrate how much rides on it. The theme decides what sources are available, whether the student's existing skills are any use, whether the idea can sustain a preparatory period without becoming repetitive, and whether the final piece is achievable in the time.
Students pick fast, and frequently for bad reasons: the theme with the nicest word in it, the theme their friend picked, the theme that sounds least like schoolwork.
One activity is about choosing properly. What makes a theme workable for a particular student and a particular skill set, what makes one a trap, and how to test an idea before committing to it. It is worth running before the paper is opened rather than after.
The objectives, and the two things students lose marks on
Six activities take the assessment objectives. Investigating sources. Critical analysis of artists' work. Experimenting with media and techniques. Drawing and recording. Written annotation. Realising personal intentions.
Two of them repay attention more than the others.
Written annotation as scored evidence. Students caption. "Charcoal, from a photo." A moderator wants the reasoning: what the source contributed, why that material, what it did that another would not, what happens next. The activity is named for the misconception because it is that common.
Critical analysis of artists. The reliable failure is writing a biography. Where the artist was born, who they trained with, what movement they belong to. None of that analyses the work, and the objective asks for analysis.
The portfolio
One activity covers structuring it, which is the difference between a folder of good work and a folder that shows a journey.
Moderators see development. A student who throws away the experiment that failed has removed the evidence that they experimented. Knowing that changes how a student works months earlier, which is why this is worth setting early rather than as revision.
Every activity, the same two demands
An unusual consistency in this set: all eight contain both a timed recall round and a sentence-building step.
The recall round is vocabulary at speed, the terms a candidate needs to have ready rather than to reconstruct. The sentence builder makes them assemble an analytical sentence in the right order rather than recognise a finished one, which is exactly the move annotation requires.
For a subject where the written element is the weak half, having both in every activity is the right design.
How the three boards differ
AQA GCSE Art and Design gives a starting point and a supervised period rather than a choice of five themes, and our activities for it cover that route.
Edexcel GCSE Art and Design is the third variation, and that page describes how its assessment is worded.
The making is the same subject in all three. The paperwork is not, and the paperwork is where marks are lost.
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
It does not teach anybody to make anything.
It does not look at your students' work.
It does not name this year's themes, which would be wrong next year.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.