Brand Evolution Challenge

Students learn about the purpose of packaging and the development of supermarket brands from Victorian times to the present day. After undertaking research from the Museum’s collection, students work in groups to improve  packaging designs in relation to consumer habits and market trends.

Curriculum links include:

• GCSE & KS3: Art & Design and Business
• BTEC: Creative Media Production: Print-Based Media
• A-Level: Graphic Design & Business

Sustainability in Packaging

A workshop with environmentalism at its centre, this one hour session will help students to explore historic and contemporary packaging created by our favourite brands, before investigating alternatives to single-use plastics and high waste levels. Students then design their own products looking towards the future with sustainability as their focus.

Curriculum links include:

• Science, History, Geography, Citizenship & Design, and Technology

Gender in Advertising

This workshop focuses on the construction of gender roles and encourages learners to be critically aware of the social and ethical impacts of design and advertising throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Students produce a poster for a product that demonstrates an increased awareness of gender stereotypes in the media.

Chocolate Product Devising & Branding

A maths and enterprise-focused interactive session in which learners brand and market a new chocolate product. After costing their product according to which ingredients to include, learners decide how to invest their marketing budget in relation to their target audience.

• Links to the curriculum include Numeracy, Literacy and PHSE

Graphic Design & Packaging

Similar to the Brand Evolution Challenge, this creative workshop encourages students to think about how packaging graphics have changed over the years and how graphics are used to communicate key messages to the consumer. Students work in groups to improve on the graphics of a current UK product.

Curriculum links include:

• GCSE: Art & Design and Business
• BTEC: Creative Media Production; Print-Based Media
• A-Level: Graphic Design and Business

Customer Profiling

Students discover how and why brands develop a customer profile. While working on a given product, students produce an in-depth profile of both its typical customer and an alternative customer. Students then create posters to compare the needs of these different markets, thus improving their understanding of how a brand might position itself.

Curriculum links include:

• GCSE: Business, Art & Design, and PHSE
• BTEC: Enterprise, Marketing, and Business
• A-Level: Business, Economics, and Graphic Design

Chocolate Packaging Design

A creative design workshop which introduces students to the purpose of packaging before asking them to create their own chocolate bar products. Students conduct market research in the collection before creating chocolate packaging designs targeted to a specific audience.

• Links to the curriculum include Literacy, Art & Design and Numeracy

Consumer History

Featuring consumer items from over 150 years of British consumer history, learners are split into groups to work together as detective historians to explore the materiality, imagery, and narrative of objects. This session enables students to use consumer history as a tool to understand chronological social history.

• Links to the curriculum include History, Art & Design and PHSE

KS1 Toys & Games

Explore the Time Tunnel searching for toys of the past. This workshop involves a tour of the museum focused on describing toys, their materials and properties. Children will take inspiration from the collection to then design and describe their own toy. Topics include everyday materials and British history and the session is designed to build skills in communication, literacy and design.