Pearson Edexcel — The exclusive course workbook for GCSE Design and Technology

The brief

We were approached by the Pearson Edexcel team to design and produce an exclusive student workbook for their GCSE (9-1) Design and Technology specification (1DT0). The full specification runs to over 250 pages and works hard for teachers and examiners — but it isn’t something a Year 10 student is going to open at home.

Pearson wanted something different: a workbook written for the student in the room, paced for the school year, and sat squarely inside the official specification. Built once, exclusive to Pearson, ready to drop into any school running their D&T GCSE.

What we designed

Working closely with Pearson’s subject specialists and editorial team, we produced a 68-page workbook that tracks the course as it’s taught rather than as it’s published. Every unit in the spec is mirrored by a section in the book — same scope, same terminology, paced unit by unit across the academic year.

• Unit openers showing each topic’s place in the full assessment framework, with timing and weighting visible at a glance.
• Key terminology pulled into wide margins — plain English first, with the specification language alongside.
• Worked examples and exam-style prompts drawn directly from past papers and annotated against published mark schemes.
• Reflection spreads between units, half-ruled and half-blank, so students can capture their own notes.
• A back-of-book glossary indexing every command verb students will meet in the written paper.