Our students at Castle@Theale put their heads together in Design & Technology to generate ideas and come up with innovative ideas for the theme of ‘transform’.

The brief was to follow the human-centred design process and evidence the journey from initial ideas to prototypes and models. Over the course of three sessions, we reflected on our ideas, gathered feedback and iterated our designs.

We then gathered all our evidence from our design journey and submitted it to The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where the judges of this competition are expecting hundreds of entries from secondary schools all over the UK. Every competition entry is an idea for a solution to a real-world problem.

Our students here at Castle@Theale were thinking about sustainability and how to transform discarded material into something new and useful. We had children’s toys, like little surfboards, made from ocean plastic found on the beaches, an eco-friendly dog-cleaning station, illuminated advertising boards made from recycled bottles, ear defenders for the shooting sport made from discarded empty cartridges, an environmentally friendly football boot and a clever way to breathe new life into old plastic bottles that anyone could do at home and by that reduce their plastic waste. One team of students designed a bench for the beach entirely made from plastic waste found on the beach.

Well done everyone for coming up with so many innovative and solution-focussed ideas that could all have a real environmental impact in our world!