Digital technologies / Year 7 and 8 / Digital Technologies Processes and Production Skills

Curriculum content descriptions

Evaluate how student solutions and existing information systems meet needs, are innovative, and take account of future risks and sustainability (ACTDIP031)

Elaborations
  • comparing student solutions with existing solutions that solve similar problems, for example identifying differences in the user interface of two adventure games and explaining how these differences affect the usability or appeal of the game
  • judging the quality of a student solution based on specific criteria such as meeting an economic need or contributing to social sustainability
  • investigating what features of touch input rather than keyboard or mouse input contribute to their success in meeting a wide range of needs, for example mimicking a common movement such as expanding or contracting a hand to change the size of an object on screen, suits users with a range of dexterity
  • evaluating the success of information systems in meeting an economic, environmental or social objective, for example interviewing a local business owner to find out how effectively their information system supports a business objective such as increasing market share
  • considering the effects of e-waste on societies and environments, for example the impacts of toxic chemicals when hardware is disposed of, and the practice of dumping unwanted digital systems overseas, particularly in the Asia region
  • comparing cloud-based information systems to client-based information systems
General capabilities
  • Literacy Literacy
  • Critical and creative thinking Critical and creative thinking
  • Personal and social capability Personal and social capability
  • ICT capability Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capability
  • Ethical understanding Ethical understanding
Cross-curriculum priorities
ScOT terms

Innovation,  Critical thinking,  Sustainable development,  Information management,  Risk management

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Create an app or game

This is a unit for Year 7 from the Scope and sequence resources from the DT Hub. The topic of creating a digital solution is organised into four key elements. Use this flow of activities to plan and assess students against the relevant achievement standards. Students follow the problem solving process to design and create ...

Interactive

Design thinking across the curriculum

This cross-curriculum resource is designed to introduce Stage 2, 3 and 4 students to the design thinking process through a series of videos and interactive activities. This resource is also downloadable as a SCORM file: the downloaded version will only work if you upload it to a webserver, such as Moodle or Canvas.

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Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies key concepts mapping: years 7-8

This PDF uses colour coding to provide a line of sight between key concepts, content descriptions and achievement standards in the Digital Technologies subject in the Australian Curriculum.

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Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies Years 7-8 Sample Assessment Task: Digital Systems

The Years 7-8 assessment task focuses on digital systems (integrating Digital Technologies and Science). The digital systems assessment task provides a scaffold to teach about and assess students’ understanding of how digital systems can be used to monitor the classroom learning environment. learn how to create environmental ...

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Light up soft toy with LilyPad

This project will explore two ways of controlling the flow of current to a LED using a button and switch. No programming is initially expected in this project, however once students are comfortable with connecting or sewing their circuits and attaching lights, a follow-up project that involves using a pre built Arduino ...

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Lilypad Personalised Alert Buzzer

In this lesson students will create a personalised musical buzzer by programming the LilyPad Arduino to play a sound using the Main board, Buzzer and Button, coding the note frequency in Arduino IDE. The lesson can be extended to include LED’s that light up or flash according to the note played to enable the buzzer to be ...

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AI quiz

This lesson provides an opportunity for students to draw on their ethical understanding when asked to respond to different scenarios. The scenarios feature information systems that incorporate an AI application. Students are given four options to select which one they believe to be the ‘right’ thing to do. Students develop ...

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Data bias in AI

Artificial intelligence can sometimes be biased to certain shapes or colours. When such AI systems are applied to situations that involve people, then this bias can manifest itself as bias against skin colour or gender. This lesson explores bias in AI, where it comes from and what can be done to prevent it.

Video

Artificial Intelligence Explainers: Video 2: AI in our everyday life | Digital Technologies Hub

In this video we look at the ways AI is making decisions that can affect your daily life. Discover some AI applications that are designed to make our lives easier. See how a machine can be considered smart as it performs human-like behaviours such as recognising speech, text, images and being able to reason. This is the ...

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Recognising AI

Use the tasks in this lesson to introduce concepts that underpin artificial intelligence (AI). The majority of the tasks are unplugged (do not require a digital device). Use the downloadable AI cards with your students to explore what they know about AI.

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Off to the movies

This is a simple Boolean (true/false) application where its asks the user’s age - if you are over 15 then you can watch G and M rated movies - if you are under 15, then you can only watch G rated movies. This lesson was designed in collaboration with Jason Vearing QSITE (Gold Coast Chapter).

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Scratch Creative Computing Guide

There is also a series of units comprising learning activities, paired with assessment activities and templates that can be used to support use of the Scratch (MIT) platform. The Scratch Creative Computing Guide supports assessment activities with visual programming environments.

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Computational thinking poster

This infographic provides an overview overview of the concepts related to computational thinking.

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ACARA sample assessment task: years 7-8

This resource provides strategies for assessing students' understanding of the ways in which data can be sourced, organised and represented to maximise options for analysis, evaluation, decomposition and visualisation in order to create digital solutions. The context of the resource is the liveability of the places in which ...

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Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies: years 7-8

This PDF provides a line of sight from content descriptions to achievement standards in the Digital Technologies subject in the Australian Curriculum.

Video

An introduction to artificial intelligence and machine learning

This video is the first of a series of 5 explainers on artificial intelligence. It discusses why it is a challenge for a computer to easily recognise one object from another. Discover how a machine learns using labelled images rather than following a specific set of rules and how AI connects with human learning.

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Rock, Paper, Scissors AI!

In this lesson we use the game rock, paper scissors to investigate how an AI can recognise your hand gestures. Firstly students create, train and test their own AI model. They import their AI model into a pre-made JavaScript program to modify the computer program to incorporate game play. The level of game play will depend ...

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Systems Thinking and AI applications

This lesson takes a systems thinking approach to understanding the place of artificial intelligence (AI) as a component within solutions to real world problems, such as predicting bushfire hotspots, spotting and monitoring animals in the wild, automated horticulture and agriculture, and early detection of medical issues.

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Habits of a Systems Thinker

This lesson introduces some of the skills and concepts involved with Systems Thinking. Students are introduced to a number of Habits of a System Thinker, positive and negative feedback loops and the concept of supra- and subsystems.

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Exploring AR Space Rocks

In this lesson, students undertake a research project about “space rocks”. They devise a research question to investigate something they would like to know about space rocks and communicate their ideas within an AR or Virtual Reality (VR) experience.