Design & Technologies Week 2025
Thanks to our amazing sponsors for their support for Design & Technologies Week 2024 |
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DATTA Vic are delighted to announce Design & Technologies Week 2025. From the 19-23 May, we will celebrate this dynamic, challenging and and essential learning area, where school students learn to be the creative problem solvers of the future! How your school participates is up to you - teachers can browse our resource bank below for ideas for activities, lessons, excursions and incursions. In previous years, some did something special with their regular classes or tutor groups, some delivered lunchtime events and some even ran design-themed school assemblies. We have created printable posters and a sample letter so you can easily spread the word! There's also a design challenge that you can run with your classes and be in the running to win a trophy! And there's even more reason to celebrate as our program runs alongside with Melbourne Design Week (MDW). This annual initiative offers a platform for designers, educators, enthusiasts, thinkers, and businesses to come together to share ideas and explore how design can be used as a force for good in an increasingly complex and precarious world. |
Please register your school if you're planning to take part. It will take seconds, but it's a huge help for us to know how schools are celebrating! |
Marketing |
Make sure you spread the work about D&T Week to the rest of your school community! We have 2 posters you can print out, the second of which is editable and is also shared as an word doc so you can add what you're doing to celebrate with your classes! We also have an email template which you can send to your colleagues, students, parents and your wider school community to demonstrate why the Design & Technologies learning area is so important. |
Design & Technologies Week Challenges - A Design Competition from DATTA Vic and RMIT |
| Thanks to our partnership with RMIT, we have two student design challenges for D&T Week 2025. You can choose to design an electric car for teenagers, or a children's play tent. You can access mini student portfolios by clicking on the images below to help students develop their products using the design process. |
Once your students have created their idea for a final product, they should then create a poster. Their posters should have;
Once the posters are complete, scan and send* them in to us as PDFs at pl@datta.vic.edu.au. You can choose to submit all your students' posters, or have a competition in school and send us your winners. The 2 winning designs will be chosen by staff from RMIT's School of Design & School of Education, and win a trophy for your school. |
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*By submitting these designs, you acknowledge that DATTA Vic has permission to share them on our social media pages and on our website. |
Melbourne Design Week 2025 |
We've selected some of the best exhibitions and events happening for Melbourne Design Week 2025. Click on the image to access the full program. |
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Events and Activities for Design & Technologies Week 2025 Thanks to our fantastic partners for their contributions |
There is a wide range of events and activities happening throughout Victoria which are perfect for teachers celebrating Design & Technologies Week with their students throughout Design & Technologies Week. We'll be adding more as they come online, so make sure you bookmark this site for the latest news! |
Excursions and Incursions |
| Design your World - Sustainable Housing with Louise O'Brien Wednesday 23 May, 9.30am - 10.30am, Online, Free Let’s design the world we want – starting with sustainable housing. Join architect and founder of Architecture for Kids School, Louise O’Brien to consider the ways in which designers and architects can address environmental issues through sustainable design. |
| Top Designs Alumni Panels Melbourne Museum, Years 10-12 In the Top Designs alumni panels, students can engage directly with successful Top Designs exhibitors, asking their questions and hearing firsthand stories about their journeys - before, during, and after Top Designs! The PD&T panel is on May 21 at 11.15am, and the Systems Engineering panel is at the same time on May 22. |
| The National Communication Museum Education Programs Hawthorn - All Levels What better way to get your students involved in D&T Week than with a visit to the new National Communication Museum? This is the place where students can encounter the past, present and future technologies that connect us. You can do a self guided visit, a guided tour, or even book your 5/6 class on PrimeSci Electric Pathways – From Circuits to Communication workshops. |
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| Talk Think Public Art at ACCA Levels 5-10 Looking for a springboard into an environmental design project? TALK THINK PUBLIC ART is an inquiry-based program that links directly to public artworks near ACCA. Different artworks are framed in relation to STEM learning, school curricular priorities and classroom projects. |
| Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre Visit Melbourne Museum, Open 7 days, 9am - 5pm All Levels If your classes are visiting Top Designs, or if you want to explore the culture and heritage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, don't miss Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, which tells the story of survival against the odds and celebrates our vibrant cultures through artefacts, storytelling and artwork. And don't miss the Milarri Garden Train - a must for teaching Food & Fibre Production. |
| Budj Bim Cultural Landscape Lake Condah, Open Monday - Friday - Tours operate on demand All levels A visit to the UNESCO World Heritage-Listed Budj Bim should be a must for all students of Design & Technologies. A tour will let you explore one of the oldest human-engineered landscapes in the world, and discover how the Gunditjmara people have lived on and managed the land sustainably for millennia. |
| National Trust Costume Collection Education Programs Incursion/Como House/Labassa House - times and dates on request Levels 7-12 The National Trust runs a fantastic suite of education programs based on their historic costume collection. Why not book a Fashion Trunk Show incursion for Design & Technologies Week, or take your class to Labassa House to be a Fashion Sleuth and Dress Detective? Your students will discover a variety of garments that demonstrate changing styles, manufacturing methods and societal changes. |
| National Wool Museum School Programs Geelong - Times and dates on request All levels The National Wool Museum has a great range of school programs, designed for preps right through to Year 12. From Woolen Wonder, where students explore the properties of wool and get hands-on crafting with wool, fibre and textiles, to Industrial Innovations, which spotlights the innerworkings of the revolutionary innovation - the Jacquard punch card programming system - through a ‘hands on’ coding activity. |
| Meet RUSTIE, the Regenerative Up-cycling Solar-powered Trailer with Interactive Education Incursion Service Looking for a great incursion for your school to celebrate Design & Technologies Week? You can book a visit from RUSTIE! The brainchild of Rethink Recycle, this unique mobile plastic upcycling machine engages students in sustainability and the circular economy. |
| Museum in a Van - Robotics on the Road The Museums Victoria incursions service brings exciting learning programs to rural areas in their outreach van. Your school could book the Robotics on the Road program for D&T Week, and get a hands-on robotics and coding program for Year 3-8 in your classrooms. |
Online Activities |
| FREE Teacher PD - Using Zoos Victoria to Inspire Creativity in Design & Technologies 22nd May, 4pm - 5pm, Online - from DATTA Vic & Zoos Victoria Join Zoos Victoria’s Education Officer, Fran Lennie, for an online session for D&T teachers. Discover how the zoo can be a powerful springboard for the design process, sparking creativity and innovation in your students and explore how to use real-world challenges, animal habitats, and conservation projects to inspire design thinking. |
| Future Without Waste Online Incursion from the Port Phillip Eco Centre The Port Phillip EcoCentre has been transforming the way Melbourne understands wildlife, waterways and climate change since 1999. They have a fantastic online incursion - Future Without Waste - which would be a perfect way to engage your students in the topic of plastic waste in our oceans. |
| Top Designs Web Hub Can't make it to visit Top Designs in person this year? Why not visit the Web hub, where your classes can take a virtual tour of the exhibition, watch recorded interviews with the student exhibitors and view all the works. |
Resources for Design & Technologies Week |
| The University of Melbourne Retrofit Lab Student Competition This is a fantastic sustainability challenge to set your students for D&T Week! They'll have the opportunity to show off their creative skills and win prizes. It is free to enter, and winners will also be included in the 2025 Retrofit Exhibition hosted at the University of Melbourne in July-August. All they need to do is reimagine a building, existing street or neighbourhood in Victoria 2050. They should consider what could be maintained, repaired, reused or upgraded! |
| An Activity a Day for Design & Technologies Week This set of resources from DATTA Vic are designed to get your students (Or colleagues!) excited about design! They include An Introduction to Design; The Elements & Principles of Design - Focus on Indigenous Design; Invention Trivia Challenge; The Design of the Boomerang and Design Factor Speed Dating. |
| Thinking Outside the Box - the Sustainable Seating Project Get your students engaged in sustainability and creative thinking with this great free resource from Forest Learning & DATTA Vic. Targeted at Year 7 & 8, your class can experience the design process, cardboard prototyping and even VR! |
| Minecraft City Challenges Our Minecraft-based design challenges get your students involved in tackling some of the biggest issues of our time: food and energy security, sustainability and health & wellbeing. These all link to the current United Nations: Sustainable Development Goals and also introduce the concept of Solarpunk, which can help to facilitate their approaches to designing and building preferred futures for the city of Melbourne. |
| Careers in Design & Engineering DATTA Vic created these short films in partnership with RMIT and Monash to spotlight pathways into further study and careers in the design and engineering sectors. They feature a fantastic range of fantastic young role models who are already pushing the boundaries in their chosen fields. |
| Speculative Design Challenges Want to encourage your students to be the creative problem solvers of the future? Then get them to take one of our Speculative Design Challenges! They include activities on Wearable Technologies; Drone Transportation; Future Communities; Home Healthcare and Lunar Living. Each activity includes a video, slides and a printable design thinking map. |
| Fantastic Fungi - The Sustainable Solution to Plastic Waste Want to celebrate emerging materials and sustainability with your students this Design & Technologies Week? Watch Amanda Morgan, founder and Head of Research and Development at the multi-award-winning Fungi Solutions, share how their work with mycelium diverts resources from landfill to sequester carbon, creates new, sustainable materials to design new products and generates economic opportunities. |
| Makedo Education Makedo is a set of safe tools for building with cardboard. It's designed to help kids use their imagination to create things like forts, costumes, and robots. If you have a set in your classroom, Makedo has a great range of lesson plans & activities on their site. And if the budget is a bit tight, they also have 3D printing files for even more pieces to add to the system. |
| Practical Action Education Resources Want to get your students thinking about the power of design and engineering to make the world a better place? Practical Action helps communities develop sustainable solutions to challenges like access to clean water, energy, and sustainable agriculture, through technology. They have lots of lesson plans and activities on ethical and sustainable design, perfect for a D&T Week activity. |
| Mini Design Challenges Looking for some short, fun activities to run for your students of all ages during D&T week? The Tech Interactive is a USA-based Science Centre, and it has produced a series of mini design challenges for students from Grades 4-12. These include activites based on earthquakes, flight, animal homes and prototyping. |
| What do you want to design? PBS Kids have some great activities to get younger children engaged in design. At this website, students are invited to chose a topic - for example, animals, fashion, sports, health, etc. Then they pick a related challenge which they can complete online as a drawing and submit it to be included on the website. There are some fantastic options - design a vest for someone who doesn't like to be tickled, or a toy to help shy children. |
| STELR Resources STELR (Science and Technology Education Leveraging Relevance) is a national initiative of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. They have a fantastic range of resources designed to engage a more diverse cohort of students in STEM, from careers webinars to a Future Health module. |
| Inspiring Design Podcasts Inspired Education founder Rashan Senanayake has created this amazing series of podcasts where he interviews some of the key leaders in the Design sector, who share their knowledge in global technologies, design thinking, industry standards and most importantly, how they connect back to education. They include people like Marvel's Ben Donnelly who designs for Hollywood movies to Jacky Yang, inventor of the Pegasus flying car! |
| Positive Role Models in Design & Engineering Want to engage a more diverse cohort of students into Design & Technologies? What better way than to highlight a variety of positive role models working in the fields of design and engineering. Discover some amazing creatives from Victoria and beyond whose work and stories will inspire young people. |
| The Science of Solar This video by Professor Kylie Catchpole was created as part of the STELR Shape your Future project and is a great resource for your Systems Engineering students. Kylie is part of a world-class research team looking at all aspects of how solar energy can become a major part of the world’s energy supply. |
| Accessory Design Inspired by Comme Des Garçons In this NGV activity, students will learn about the conceptual processes of designer Rei Kawakubo, from Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons. Following a design process, students will design an accessory to accompany one of Kawakubo’s runway looks and create a sculptural prototype using simple materials. |
| Designers & Builders - Inspired by the Memphis Design Group This NGV art and design activity is great for the primary years. It explores geometric forms, shapes and colours in the work of Ettore Sottsass, and asks students to redesign an everyday piece of furniture from their home. |
| The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier This VCE PD&T resource from the NGV is based on The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier - From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk. It includes a Fashion Design Task, focus questions and activities. |
| Fernando Laposse - The Avocado Legacy Want to get your students immersed in ethical design this D&T Week? Fernando Laposse is a Mexican designer whose work was part of the NGV Triennial 2024. He uses his design to highlight the negative impact avocado farming has had on his local community. Fernando's work is a great reflection on cultural influence on design, the ethical considerations of a designer's practice and the technology of materials. The NGV have produced this video on his work. |
| Creative Practice: Globe International by NGV The NGV has produced this fantastic resource for VCE PD&T which investigates the product design process used to develop Globe International’s G3 Bar Skateboard Deck and Dimension Shoe. It includes interviews with Global Head of Product Design, Matthew Wong, who discusses their initial product design through to sustainable product redevelopment. and examines the role of research, materials, technologies, evaluation and sustainability in their user-centred design process. The resource also includes questions for classroom discussion. |
| Creative Practice: Great Wrap by NGV This NGV resource for PD&T encourages students to investigate the product design process used to develop Great Wrap’s Nudie Roll, a home-compostable stretch wrap, and the Great Mate dispenser that accompanies it. In 6 videos, the designers describe the steps involved in creating the potato waste-based material used to produce the wrap and discuss key steps in the design process that informed the development and refinement of this ground-breaking product. They explain the importance of the end user in the design process and highlight the significance of their collaboration with Bayly Group designers. |
| Possum Skin Cloaks with Maree Clarke by NGV This is another fantastic resource from the NGV for Levels 3-6. Students learn about how Maree made her possum-skin cloak and the personal meaning of the design, then create a design representing significant places or journeys from their own lives. It includes a video, worksheet, resources list, tips on using the design process and evaluating their work. |
| We the Makers by The National Wool Museum We the Makers is the National Wool Museum's biennial program dedicated to supporting authentic design, material consciousness and sustainable, ethical practice. Their Sustainable Fashion Prize challenges the next generation of fashion designers to create an outfit that “represents their personal design aesthetic and showcases their commitment to sustainable fashion.” The NWM has created this great series of interviews with the participating designers - Watch them with your students for some D&T Week inspiration! |
| Ethical Clothing Australia Resources Do you want to explore local sustainable fashion with your students during Design & Technologies Week? Check out Ethical Clothing Australia's website for some great information. They prompt you to consider a range of issues, from, Are your school uniforms ethical? to The costs of manufacturing onshore vs offshore? You'll definitely find some great talking points to get your students engaged in this global issue. |
| Workers' Stories by Ethical Clothing Australia Want to explore who is actually making the ethical fashions we are lucky to have in Victoria? Ethical Clothing Australia has interviewed three people involved in the fashion industry - Kin, Anh and George - and find out more about the process of manufacturing sustainable textiles and garments |
| Engineering Solutions: Air Pollution for Primary The UK's James Dyson Foundation has produced this unit of work for Upper Key Stage 2 (Years 5-6 in Victoria) which focuses on how engineering can solve the global problem of air pollution. The digital pack includes lesson plans, work sheets, videos and posters. |
| Engineering Solutions: Air Pollution for Secondary The James Dyson Foundation has also created a unit of work on tackling air pollution for Key Stage 3 & 4 (Years 7-10 in Vic), which as well as the worksheets, videos and posters also includes an activity on using Arduino to build an air quality monitoring device. |
| Engineering Challenge Cards Here's another fantastic free resource from the James Dyson Foundation - you can download a range of engineering challenge cards, including a balloon car race, spaghetti bridges, marble run, cardboard chair, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Deepvali, Christmas, and much more! |
Do you want to be a Design & Technologies Week partner and have your events/resources listed on this site? Contact Laura @ pl@datta.vic.edu.au |
If you need some more ideas for activities, the Design & Technologies Week website is filled with resources to help you engage your students - including design challenges, engineering activities, virtual tours, STEM projects industry podcasts and much, much more! This site is live all year round, and is a great resource for teachers!
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