Year 8 Design & Technology: A Recipe for Success

The Year 8 D&T students are currently undertaking a Food Tech x Systems Design project, which aims to blend culinary skills with systems design principles, preparing students for an upcoming systems design/coding unit. This project emphasizes 21st-century skills such as collaboration, communication, productivity, adaptability, flexibility, and leadership. 

Project Overview: 

Student teams are tasked with designing a batch production system to produce 40 cookies that are manufactured to a marketable quality. The project is divided into three main objectives: 

1. Efficient production (project management)

2. Quality control 

3. Zero waste (resource management and sustainability) 

Student teams only have 50 minutes to set up, make cookies from scratch, decorate the cookies, and clean up. This is no easy feat! It requires teamwork, detailed planning, time and project management, and quality control. This project is about designing a successful and efficient system, not a recipe design. 

Many teams have decided to design and manufacture their own 3D-printed cookie cutters and stamps for higher quality control and efficiency. Some cookie cutters have been engineered to cut multiple cookies with zero-waste built in... Smart design!  

Students have two prototype cooks to test their system design and one final assessed cook in Term 2. The final test cook will be filmed documentary-style and will explain how teams worked together to achieve their success and marketable quality cookies. 

If the teams’ system design is successful, they will have the opportunity to manufacture their cookies again in Term 4, for enterprise and selling at the school fair. 

Good luck to the teams!