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

Online

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.

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Building a virtual tour about Uluru

In this lesson, students create a 360 educational Google Tour about Uluru and the Aboriginal peoples who are the traditional owners of the land.

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AR Solar System with Metaverse

In this lesson, students explore our Solar System in Augmented Reality (AR). Students start by exploring a set of AR flashcards that present the Sun and Planets in our Solar System and then go on to use the Metaverse App to create their own AR solar system experience based on research.

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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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Home automation: General purpose programming

Investigate home automation systems, including those powered by artificial intelligence (AI) with speech recognition capability. These suggested activities for year levels 7-8 are designed for students using general purpose programming languages JavaScript and Python, with similar content to the visual coding lesson Home ...

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Analysis of AI applications, drawing on ethical understandings

This lesson plan explores the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence and the implications on our future lives. This lesson was developed by the Digital Technologies Institute in collaboration with the DT Hub.

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Home automation with AI

Home automation is all the rage. You talk to your mobile phone to control the lights, the fan, the air conditioner, or your pool pump. But how does it work? In this lesson, we explore the AI that could power a home automation system.

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AI image recognition - exploring limitations and bias

A hands-on activity to practise training and testing an artificial intelligence (AI) model, using cartoon faces, including a discussion about sources of potential algorithmic bias and how to respond to these sources.

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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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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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Anti-bullying AI

Sometimes we write and post things on social media in a hurry. Such posts can hurt people and even make them feel bullied. Wouldn't it be great if an Artificial Intelligence application could check our posts as we write them, and warn us if they were potentially hurtful?

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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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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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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 ...

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Computers and binary

This is a unit for Year 8 from the Scope and sequence resources from the DT Hub. The topic of data representation is organised into four key elements. Use this flow of activities to plan and assess students against the relevant achievement standards. Students examine the ways all computer data including text, images and ...

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Robotics and embedded systems

This is a unit for Year 8 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 ...

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There can only be one

In this lesson sequence students write a simple suite of programs that can be used to facilitate an S.R.C. election though the collection and processing of data. It assumes that students have been introduced to Python programming language.

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Everything is numbers!

In this sequence students learn how the binary number system works, how we can represent text using binary numbers and learn one of the representations of the standard English alphabet used by computers. They look at how the same concepts apply to non-text data and analyse the effectiveness of some binary representation ...