| Award level | Criteria breakdown | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Bronze | The student showed they considered any problems they encountered. They resolved the issues with simple but effective solutions. | I had some problems with the practical side of the project, but once I asked my teacher for help I found it much easier to complete. |
| Silver | The student showed they considered problems and the wider situation or cause. They thought about ways to solve the issues and deployed relevant and pragmatic solutions. | One problem we had whilst completing our project was being able to find reliable and relevant information – because there is clearly a lot of information on the topic of space. To overcome this, we made sure to only research content directly related to the aims we had set. We used advanced searches in Google, as well as going to reputable journals, such as [xxxx] |
| Gold | The student approached problems strategically. They demonstrated a good understanding of the root cause(s) of the problems encountered. They created solutions that were effective, innovative and (if relevant) founded on their research. | Once a suitable diameter for the coil had been achieved, we applied glue to the rails with a hot glue gun which would hold the coil in place. Then, the top faces of the acrylic squares were removed, and further applications of glue secured the whole coil. Unfortunately, the hot glue gun’s temperature was too hot, and the acrylic plate began to melt. What was worse was that the acrylic melted at the glue gun’s lowest temperature setting so we couldn’t make the glue come out of the gun any cooler. We tried various workarounds, including applying the glue to the coil, allowing it to cool and then making contact with the plates at the last minute. However, this didn’t work either as the glue solidified at too high a temperature. Finally, we went back to our research on different types of adhesives and decided to try our second choice, a contact adhesive. The contact adhesive was applied to the coil and acrylic square which formed a good bond – even if it did take 30 minutes to fully set. |