Help with your project topics -  IF IN DOUBT ASK !!!!

Textiles Exam Coursework

Your teachers have considerable experience in knowing what the exam board requires from candidates in the coursework. It makes sense therefore that you listen to what your teachers have to say….. Here are a few 'focus' areas that may help to improve your marks.

Using ICT for TEXTILES:  Obviously WORD PROCESSING gives a significant potential for improvement.  Your work instantly improves in the quality of PRESENTATION even if it is only the headings that are word-processed.
Since you are always  expected to produce questionnaires to establish market preferences and to undertake tests when you have designs which need to be developed spreadsheets and graphic displays are all essential.

Simple DRAW packages like CORELDRAW,  AUTOCAD and AUTOSKETCH
allow you to produce professional results.  Clipart and scanned images can
all be added to personalise your work.   
For your pack designs use PRO-DESKTOP to model the final appearance of creative shapes.  Be wary of including to much clipart as anyone who works a lot with computers (and the exam-board marking team will be such people) are too familiar with these images to rate them highly.
   
For variety try to include as many as you can from such as; Spidergrams, sketches, photographs, scanned images, graphs, piecharts, etc)

SCANNERS:  If you have access to a scanner you can change your own images to a form that can easily be included in documents of your own.  Be wary of scanning images from books and leaflets as these are technically copyright
material and as such should be 'credited' with the source from where you have obtained them ~ certainly never passed off as your own efforts.

Save your images as .JPEG (sometimes .JPG) files as these are compressed but can contain a large range of colours.  In programs such as 'PAINT-SHOP-PRO' you have the option of compressing your files to your own requirements.

Another standard form is the .GIF format and this is very common in
documents appearing on the www.  Using formats such as these you can save files to floppy discs and transfer them to other machines.  However be wary of BITMAP files (.BMP) as these are much larger and can take up several Megabytes of your hard-disc space...and frequently will not fit on floppy discs. A great feature of scanners is that you get good results scanning the item or your fabric ideas directly.  Check out the page within this site on mechanisms … the plastic toys (dogs+cats) were scanned in directly from 3-D objects

Remember your teachers are here to help you with advice and guidance.  Use them and use your time wisely.  Plan what you propose to do and when it is due in.
Remember too that coursework attracts a high proportion of the available marks...

Y7 Y8 Y9