IGCSE Design and Technology Tutors for the Design Project and Option Papers

There is no rate card, and IB Gram does not publish prices. The fee depends on the tutor's experience, the grade, the option area and how often you meet — a weekly Grade 9 sketching habit is a different job from an intensive Grade 11 folder rescue with a March hand-in. Once a specific tutor is suggested, their rate is put in writing before you book, so you are looking at a real figure rather than a bracket. Ask for it in the first exchange if you want to compare quickly.

Look at the course outline the department issued, or the header on a marked assessment; the code is nearly always printed there. Cambridge runs 0445 with A*–G grades and 0979 as the 9–1 graded version of the same subject, and some schools enter a Pearson Edexcel International GCSE instead. If you cannot find it, photograph a worksheet or an assessment sheet and send it over and we will identify it. It takes a minute and it stops a tutor preparing against the wrong specification.

No, and a tutor who offered to would be removed. IB Gram tutors coach design thinking, folder structure, drawing conventions and evaluation; they do not generate concepts for submission, draw or render folder pages, build CAD models on the student's behalf, write specification or evaluation text, or make any part of the artefact. In a moderated coursework subject the student's own decision-making is precisely what is being assessed, so producing the work for them would not just be dishonest, it would be self-defeating.

Partly, and honestly is the only way to do it. The first session works out what genuine evidence already exists — dated photographs, rough sketches, notes in a book, messages to a teacher — and builds real pages from that rather than inventing a history. Phases that were never actually done cannot be conjured, and a folder that reads as reconstructed tends to be spotted. The practical advice is usually to spend the remaining hours on testing and evaluation, which can still be done properly because the product exists.

For most of the qualification, yes. Research, specification, ideation, development, drawing, planning for manufacture and evaluation are all paper and screen work, and they review well when a student shares or photographs a page and the tutor annotates it live. What online cannot do is supervise machines, tools or workshop safety — that belongs to the school's teacher and technician, and no responsible tutor pretends otherwise. What a tutor can do is prepare a student before workshop time and review the photographs afterwards.

Choose from what the department actually offers first, because a school teaches one or two, not all of them. Beyond that, graphic products suits students who think in layout, packaging and communication; resistant materials suits those who want to cut, join and finish timber, metal and polymers; systems and control suits students comfortable with mechanisms, electronics and logic. A tutor can talk a student through what each option's written paper expects, but the school's timetable and workshop facilities usually settle it.

A large share — in the Cambridge structure that has applied for several series, the school-assessed design project has carried roughly half the total marks, with a design paper and one option written paper making up the rest. Cambridge revises its syllabuses on a cycle and newer versions are not identical, so confirm the current weighting with the department or the board rather than relying on a figure found online. Either way, the project is too big a component to leave until the term it is due.

This is the most common profile on this page, and the work is mostly translation rather than composition. A tutor asks questions — why that material, what the user said, which specification point that change answered — and the student writes down their own answers. Over a few weeks the annotation becomes a habit and the pages stop being a chore bolted on at the end. The tutor never writes the text; the whole point is that the reasoning on the page is the student's.

Sometimes, and only in India, and only where a tutor is currently taking in-person students near you. Requests are densest in Gurugram, South and South-West Delhi, Noida, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai, but availability moves each term as tutors' own schedules change. If nothing is free near you we will say so plainly rather than leave you waiting. There is no centre or branch to visit, and outside India tutoring is online only.

Tutors are based in India, and sessions are set in your own local hours rather than Indian ones. Families in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Nairobi, Lagos, the UK and Europe are scheduled by working across the offset, which often puts a late-evening Indian slot into a convenient after-school hour locally. Send your city and time zone in the first message and a specific weekly slot will be proposed in local time. Outside India, sessions are online.

Grade 9 is cheaper and far more effective, because the habits that carry this subject — annotated sketching, photographing work in progress, writing testable specification points — take months to become automatic and cannot be installed in the weeks before a hand-in. Starting in the project term is still worth doing, but the work becomes triage rather than coaching. If you have a choice, a light fortnightly session through Grade 10 beats an intensive block in Grade 11.

Undocumented decisions. Students make something good and cannot show how they arrived at it, so the research, development and evaluation credit goes uncollected while the artefact itself sits there looking fine. The second biggest is an evaluation written as a paragraph of general satisfaction instead of a point-by-point test against the student's own specification, including the points that failed. Both are timeline problems more than ability problems, which is why a tutor spends so much time on dates.

Yes, and it is one of the strongest uses of an online session. A student shares a drawing and the tutor questions it directly: which projection is this, is the symbol shown, can that dimension be read two ways, does the inside need a sectional view, would a workshop be able to build from this. For CAD, tell us which package the school uses when you write, because tutors name specific software rather than claiming CAD generally. The student does all the drawing.

Tell us and a different tutor is arranged; persisting with a poor match out of politeness helps nobody, least of all on a coursework clock. The first lesson is a free trial precisely so both sides can check the fit before anything is committed. Mismatches after that are usually about working style rather than competence — a tutor who moves faster than the student documents, for instance. Raising it in week two costs nothing; raising it in month three costs a phase of the project.

No. IB Gram is an independent tutoring platform, not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Cambridge International, Pearson Edexcel, Oxford AQA or the IB Organization. Codes such as 0445 and 0979 are named only so families can tell what a tutor actually covers. The awarding bodies remain the only authority on syllabus content, component weightings, coursework regulations and entry rules, and anything on this page should be confirmed against your school's guidance or the board's current syllabus document.