KS3 ICT – Sample Unit 8.5
Discovery! Members
of a year 9 group
engrossed in their
Chocolate Project
‘This is a unifying unit, focusing on a systems approach. It brings together financial modelling, control
and monitoring, and marketing……..This unit involves a feasibility study for a charity fundraising project
to raise seedlings for sale at a later date. The school has received a letter from a charity, with whom they
have worked in the past, asking if they would consider being involved again after a break of several years.
The charity would like the school to raise bedding plants from seed. The young plants would be
advertised and sold by advance order and then be available for collection at the charity’s open day. The
school has a greenhouse that can be used, but it is not accessible outside school hours, so a simple control
system would be needed to run it automatically.’ Key Stage 3 National Strategy / ICT Sample teaching
unit 8.5
After running through the original sample unit twice, Ringwood came to the conclusion that the unit
provided an excellent opportunity for students to demonstrate their ability to manage and carry out a
project involving the implementation of a system utilising a wide variety of skills acquired during earlier
sample strategy units. However, the suggested context of the project was unappealing: the sale of bedding
plants held little interest to the majority of our students. Consequently we explored the possibility of
improving the context, and ‘The Chocolate Project’ was born.
This is fundamentally the same unit and can be taught in exactly the same way that you will have
approached the bedding plant scenario. We have altered the initial memo to mention chocolate bars rather
than bedding plants, and the database of previous customers now lists how many bars of different types of
chocolate they ordered rather than how many bedding plants they required.
In preparation for KS3 SATs we send the memo, database and any other pieces of information to students
by e-mail to help get them used to responding to written instructions. The amount of support and
supervision given to students depends on their ability, and recently we have been experimenting with
using minimal teacher input with the top set. (At Ringwood KS3 ICT does not have discrete setting but is
set against maths. Although not perfect, the correlation between performance in these subjects is high.)
The able and gifted students have performed very well, not only covering all aspects of the project that we
were looking for but also applying some novel ideas.
Much of the project encompasses ‘Enterprise Education’, encouraging students to apply principles learnt
in ICT to a realistic scenario.
Brainstorm
We have found that the idea of a chocolate project stimulates immediate interest, and students generate
ideas very rapidly. To ensure that these are captured we encourage them to use Inspiration, a program that
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‘builds visual diagrams such as concept maps, mind maps and other diagrams to develop strong thinking
and organisational skills’. There are many other similar programs available.
Sherbet
Fruit
Caramel
White
Coffee
Healthy
size
Coconut
Biscuit
Nuts
Dark
Milk
Chocolate
colour
packaging
Raisin
bar
Type
materials
temperature
Jam
Packaging
box
Taste
conveyor
belt
automation
Control
Chocolate
Target
Audience
Location
multipack
Size
individual
chocs
Slogans
Age
Adverts
Quality
Advertising
radio
Price
HexBar
Name
Don't
Be
Hasty,
Its Just
Too
Tasty
jingle
TV
ChocoBar
logo
Compare
With Size
website
cost of
ingredients
Compare
To Other
Prices
Chocothing
cost of
advertising
cost of
packaging
We also encourage students to use Gantt charts for planning their project. Students choose a suitable
program to produce their Gantt charts: some choose the relatively sophisticated Microsoft Visio where
others construct simpler charts in Excel or Word.
Research
Chocolate recipes, melting points, rival chocolate manufacturers, ingredient costs etc are easily found on
the Internet and encourage students to implement the search techniques that they have developed in
earlier units of work (such as 7.2). More able students have independently chosen to find out about fair
trade ingredients and have explored the nutritional values of their chosen chocolate, together with health
concerns, without prompting. This has helped make links with the schools citizenship, Eco Schools and
‘Healthy Eating’ initiatives.
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The video ‘Inside a Factory II: Cadbury’s’ by TV choice explores the way computers play a key role in
the manufacture of chocolate, focussing on control but including other aspects too. It is an interesting
stimulus to use with students. (TV Choice Ltd – e-mail: tvchoiceuk@aol.com)
www.cadbury.co.uk is a useful site for many aspects of the project. The ‘Chocolate machine’ (in the ‘Fun
& Stuff’ section) is a game which asks users to produce a fixed number of chocolate bars. The game
introduces less able students to some simple control principles needed to mass-produce chocolate bars
(e.g. not running out of ingredients, filling up ingredients as they run low, ensuring that there is no over or
under production etc.) The ‘Learning Zone’ contains a case study about the introduction of the ‘Fuse’ bar
which provides ideas about developing a new product. The ‘About Chocolate’ section of the site has
information about the history of chocolate and its manufacture. Cadbury also have resource packs
available for a small charge. Other suitable sites are plentiful.
Students need to make lots of decisions about who their target audience will be, what type of chocolate
they should produce, what fillings they should have, whether they should produce individual chocolates,
bars, bags, boxes, what price they should charge, how much profit they are aiming for, what the
packaging will be like, how and where they will advertise their product etc. They can answer these
questions and provide evidence for their decisions by carrying out suitable surveys, using questionnaires
and producing suitable outputs to justify their decisions. Some have set up databases from their surveys
and then performed queries to produce evidence to support their choices.
Non-ICT research can involve collecting and evaluating wrappers, printed adverts etc, and students can
also evaluate TV advertisements.
Packaging
Students have packaging skills from their Graphics lessons that they can transfer to this part of the
project. They can also draw on previous units (such as 7.3) to produce a suitable logo.
One group designed this Logo
and brand name to fit in with
the school’s ‘Healthy Eating’
initiative
http://wrappedhersheys.com/ allows you to personalise wrappers for special occasions, providing plenty
of ideas for the students’ packaging. Firms such as Geneiva Chocolates (www.geneivachocolates.co.uk)
specialise in producing promotional chocolates for companies to use. They are a brilliant source of
inspiration for novel approaches to packaging, and a few leaflets from them can act as a interesting
stimulus. Many students choose to make nets and actually construct their boxes, wrappers etc, but
recently some have chosen to use Google SketchUp (freely downloadable from www.sketchup.com) to
produce their wrappers. Although the program is intended to be used to create buildings, it lends itself to
the design of 3D packages.
Having designed the wrapper students also need to consider having consistency across all aspects of their
product, as Cadbury do with their distinctive purple colour for all their Dairy Milk products.
We try to keep a number of contrasting empty packages as stimuli e.g. a Smartie tube, a Ferrero Rocher
box, a Mars Bar wrapper etc. This helps to remind them about audience, colour, shape etc. More able
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students also consider display: spherical chocolates do not stay on shelves and are more difficult to box
than cuboids, some prisms tessellate and can be packaged more efficiently than other shapes etc. There
are plenty of potential links with maths.
Publicity/Marketing
This utilises many of the concepts introduced in earlier units. It is the area which students particularly
enjoy so caution must be exercised to ensure that this aspect does not dominate the project. To advertise
their product students may choose to create posters, flyers, TV ads, jingles, radio advertisements etc.
(Some have used Sibelius, a program learnt in their music lessons, to compose their jingles.) With a large
year group engaged in this project we make extensive use of the ‘Digital Blue’ cameras. These allow
students to take photos, make adverts with jingles etc very simply, and although the picture quality is
limited file sizes are relatively small, so we do not take up too much server space saving images. Some
students have chosen to use Flash to produce animated advertisements, others have produced websites to
publicise their products, drawing on skills acquired during unit 8.2.
Several students have chosen to work in small groups and have allocated specific roles to each member:
we have examples of groups who have named their company and produced individual business cards,
corporate stationary etc, linking with work from unit 7.3.
In discussing marketing strategies, some groups have come up with a range of competitions and other
devices to help increase sales. The idea of the ‘Golden Ticket, as used by Willie Wonka, has surfaced
quite often, as have multi-packs, introductory ‘money-off’ coupons etc. These elements can be built into
the financial model, lending them to ‘what if’ queries.
Some students have decided to produce some background to the ‘Phoenix Centre’ that sent out the
original request for help. By pretending that the centre is, for example, a children’s hospice, an old
people’s home or similar they are then able to use this information in their publicity etc. (One group this
year has decided that the centre supports women with breast cancer. As a result they have used pink in
their packaging and advertising, together with the pink ribbon logo associated with ‘Breast Cancer
awareness’.)
The database of previous customers can be used here: students can use the mail-merge techniques that
they have learnt in previous units to personalise letters to ex-customers to see if they would like to be part
of the new scheme.
Finance
In their financial model students will need to consider the cost of the ingredients, packaging, marketing
etc, the revenue from the sales, the profit etc: the level of complexity of the financial model will depend
on the students’ abilities, and less able students will need to be given an initial model, similar to that for
the school fete in Sample Unit 8.4, to get them started. More able students have drawn on their
knowledge of web queries (from Sample Unit 8.1) to look up the current costs of ingredients, exchange
rates etc where appropriate to feed into their model and update projections and have produced scenarios,
used goal seek, conditional formatting etc to help analyse their models.
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Control
At first glance this aspect of the project may look the most intimidating, but in unit 7.6 students will have
become familiar with control and can apply these principles to the chocolate production. Diagrams of the
automated system usually involve a conveyor belt with ingredients being added, mixed, shaped, moulded,
packed etc. Students also add temperature sensors, humidity sensors etc and include feedback. For those
who have previously used Flowol, the greenhouse and jam factory mimics can be used as examples of
some relevant aspects of control. Flow charts can be produced in Flowol, Microsoft Visio or any other
suitable programs. Similarly students can select appropriate programs to draw a representation of their
automated system. See Appendix for an example.
Presentation
At the end of the unit students are expected to present their findings to a member of the School’s
leadership team, somewhat like in ‘Dragons’ Den’ on the TV. They must present their ideas persuasively
to convince the viewer that their project is the best thought out etc. and should be the one that goes
forward to the Phoenix centre. This provides students with an opportunity to combine all aspects of their
work on the project into an effective PowerPoint presentation or similar in which they use suitable
sounds, images, graphics statistics etc.
Obviously this is not a technology lesson, and we do not require the students to make their chocolates.
However, each year a number do provide samples for tasting at the final presentation, and parents often
become involved too. Caution needs to be exercised here, but when a parent is a trained patissier the
testing and evaluating can be quite enjoyable!
Hopefully these notes, although not comprehensive or prescriptive, will encourage you to experiment
with this approach to unit 8.5 and others. The ICT curriculum can be fun and informative! If you require
any further ideas or information just contact me: sue.strassheim@ringwood.hants.sch.uk
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Appendix:
The following accompanied a very complicated flowchart produced in Flowol. The diagram itself is far
too large to fit here, but the students have included some annotated screenshots of parts of their flowchart
to illustrate their explanations.
“In the Flowol diagram, unless otherwise specified, motor a represents the main conveyor belt.
Whenever you see “motor a fd” followed by “wait 1” and then “turn motor a off”, this is the process of
taking the beans (at whatever stage) to the next sub process. Also, all times are in minutes.
A “sub” process is one of the main processes- these are the sub processes: Cleaner
Weight/ Roast
Roast: 1
2
3
4
Winnow
Grind
Mix
Refine
Conch
Temperate
Mould
Pack
I have included useful screenshots throughout, to help.
Also, when in a sub- process, if an output is turned on,
you can
assume it is the piece of machinery that does the job.
1. First, the cocoa seeds must be cleaned. The
conveyor belt is turned on to 40%, to make sure is
working, and then on to 100% to get things going.
Then the cleaner process begins.
2. The Cleaner process turns motor a forward (this
moves the beans through the cleaner) then turns
output 7 on (this is the water jets) and then waits
for 25 minutes while they clean, and then
transports the beans out of the cleaner.
3. The then weighing and the roasting begins.
First of all, the beans are weighed in batches. They are
then weighed- variable a represents the weight showed by
the scales. The heavier the bean, the thicker it is, and so the
longer it has to be roasted for.
The different
weights go to
different roasting
cycles. There is
also a setting if
they are too heavyit waits 10 minutes
to let the scale
settle.
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4.After that, the heavier beans are sent to a longer roasting cycle (this is processes roast 1 through 4) The
conveyor belt then takes the beans through to the cooling room, where they stay from 20 cold minutes.
They are then shipped off to the next process- the winnowing machine. This is where the beans are
stripped of their outer shells, leaving just the part that can be made into chocolate.
5. Next, the beans are transported to the grinding area- the beans are ground down to a fine paste, called
chocolate liquor.
6. Now, motor B turns on. This is where half of the liquor is taken to the press, and half is left for a while,
to be used as straight liquor in the chocolate making.
7. The presses separate the liquor into cocoa solids (unneeded in chocolate) and cocoa butter (needed).
The solids are transported into lorries (motor c), where it is taken away and sold. The liquor is then taken
to the mixing area (motor b) and the main liquor is also taken to the mixing area (motor a).
8. The mixture is now mixed. It is then taken to the refining room ,. It is then conched- churning it up to
make it nice and creamy. It is then temparated, which is the process of heating it and cooling it; this
makes it melt in the mouth, and gives it that shiny look. This takes 6 days. It is then moulded - in this
input 2 represents the flow of chocolate into the moulds. When it stops, the moulding process ends. The
moulded chocolates then pass on the packing room, and the sent on to the lorries, to be shipped off to the
shops.
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