Binary Code Professional Development

The Technologies learning area is relatively new to the Australian Curriculum. It is comprised of two distinct but related subjects being Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies. This Professional Development focuses on the Digital Technologies strand.

 

Why do we have to teach Digital Technologies to our students?

Technologies impact the lives of people and societies globally and Australia needs young people who can independently and collaboratively develop solutions to complex challenges and contribute to sustainable patterns of living if we are going to be able to compete with other developed countries.

 

The Australian Technologies Curriculum allows students learn about and work with traditional, contemporary and emerging technologies that shape the world in which we live. The Digital Technologies Curriculum allows a hands on learning approach for students and specifically aims to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills of students.

 

The specific aims of the Digital Technologies Curriculum are that students are able to:

• design, create, manage and evaluate sustainable and innovative digital solutions to meet and redefine current and future needs

• use computational thinking and the key concepts of abstraction; data collection, representation and interpretation; specification, algorithms and implementation to create digital solutions

• confidently use digital systems to efficiently and effectively automate the transformation of data into information and to creatively communicate ideas in a range of settings

• apply protocols and legal practices that support safe, ethical and respectful communications and collaboration with known and unknown audiences

• apply systems thinking to monitor, analyse, predict and shape the interactions within and between information systems and the impact of these systems on individuals, societies, economies and environments.

(Taken directly from the Australian Curriculum digital technologies aims).

 

Key Ideas

While the overarching idea behind the Technologies Curriculum is creating preferred futures, the other focus is on project management. There are a number of Thinking in Technologies goals as well including systems thinking, design thinking and computational thinking. Systems thinking is a holistic approach to the identification and solving of problems where the focal points are treated as components of a system, and their interactions and interrelationships are analysed individually to see how they influence the functioning of the entire system. In Digital Technologies, systems thinking involves understanding the complexity of systems and the interdependence of components to ensure timely solutions to technical, economic and social problems are produced. Design thinking involves the use of strategies for understanding design needs and opportunities, visualising and generating creative and innovative ideas, planning, and analysing and evaluating those ideas that best meet the criteria for success. In digital technologies, design thinking requires the students to explore, analyse and develop ideas based on data, inputs and human interactions. Design thinking requires the students to consider how users will be presented with data, the degree of interaction with that data and the various types of computational processing when designing a solution to a problem. Computational thinking is most relevant in Digital Technologies and is a problem-solving method that is used to create solutions that can be implemented using digital technologies. It is used specifically when specifying and implementing algorithmic solutions to problems in Digital Technologies. For a computer to be able to process data through a series of logical and ordered steps, students must be able to take an abstract idea and break it down into defined, simple tasks that produce an outcome. This may include analysing trends in data, responding to user input under certain preconditions or predicting the outcome of a simulation.

 

Structure and Strands

The structure of the Technologies curriculum is different to the other curriculum strands within the Australian Curriculum in that the curriculum for each Technologies subject is written in bands of year levels:

• Foundation – Year 2

• Years 3 and 4

• Years 5 and 6

• Years 7 and 8

• Years 9 and 10.

 

However, the knowledge, understanding and skills in each subject are presented much the same as other subjects, through two related strands being knowledge and understanding, and processes and production skills.

Teachers can select technologies-specific content from the Knowledge and understanding strand and students can apply skills from the Processes and production skills strand to that content.

 

The Knowledge and understanding focus for Digital Technologies are:

• Digital systems: the components of digital systems: hardware, software and networks and their use.

• Representation of data: how data are represented and structured symbolically

 

The Processes and production skills strand focuses on:

• collecting,

• managing, and

• analysing data.
  It does this by focusing on creating digital solutions by: investigating and defining, generating and designing, producing and implementing, evaluating and collaborating and managing

 

Years 5-6 Digital Technologies Curriculum

• The focus of this PD is the Year 5-6 Technologies Curriculum. In years 5 and 6 students are given the opportunity to further develop their understanding and skills in computational thinking while focusing on the sustainability of information systems for current and future uses.

• By the end of Year 6, students will have created a range of digital solutions including games or quizzes and interactive stories and animations. Students are developing an understanding of the role individual components of digital systems play in the processing and representation of data in Years 5 and 6.

• Students will acquire, validate, interpret, track and manage various types of data throughout the two-year period and will develop an understanding of the relationship between models and the real-world systems they represent.

• Students will be given opportunities to individually and collaboratively create, design, evaluate and manage solutions to real-world and hypothetical problems. By engaging with others, students are given the opportunity to demonstrate how they take personal and physical safety into account, applying social and ethical protocols that acknowledge factors such as social differences and privacy of personal information.

• They also develop their skills in applying technical protocols such as devising file naming conventions that are meaningful and determining safe storage locations to protect data and information.