1. Rationale
1.1. Technology is a driving force to enable us to expand and grow and with that the Australian Curriculum has created the 'Technologies' learning area. This area is designed to provide students with the abilities and skills to enrich and impact our world for future generations to come.
2. Content Structure: Subjects
2.1. The Technologies curriculum is divided into two different learning areas. These two learning areas are Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies. These two learning concepts are broken down into two strands which are knowledge and understandings and processes and production skills. it is these two strands that form the foundation for the content descriptors and the elaborations.
2.1.1. Design and Technologies
2.1.1.1. Students use their skills in design thinking in order to create and design solutions that are authentic in their use.
2.1.2. Digital Technologies
2.1.2.1. Students use their skills in computational thinking to create and produce authentic solutions.
3. Content Structure
3.1. Knowledge and understanding
3.1.1. Design and Technologies
3.1.1.1. Technologies and our society: How the technology we use impacts on our lives and our society
3.1.1.2. Technologies context: how technologies can be designed to meet a range of varying contexts..
3.1.2. Digital Technologies
3.1.2.1. Digital Systems: Understanding the components of a system (hardware, software and networks and how they are used)
3.1.2.2. Data Representation: How data can be represented and structured symbolically
3.2. Processess and Production kills
3.2.1. Design and Technologies
3.2.1.1. Creating designed solutions by applying the following skills: investigating, generating, reducing, evaluating and collaborating and managing
3.2.2. Digital technologies
3.2.2.1. Collecting, managing and analysing data: the nature and properties of data and how the data is collected and then analysed.
3.2.2.2. Digital implementation: the process in which digital solutions are implemented
3.2.2.3. Creating solutions by applying the following skills of investigating and defining, designing, producing and implementing, evaluating and collaborating and managing.
4. Key Ideas
4.1. Within the technologies curriculum there are three key ideas that support the knowledge and the skills that the students will develop through their emersion in the learning program.
4.1.1. Thinking in Technologies
4.1.1.1. Design Thinking
4.1.1.2. Computational Thinking
4.1.1.3. System thinking
4.1.1.4. Creative/Critical Thinking
4.1.2. Project management
4.1.2.1. Developing skills to be able to manage projects through the use of the required process.
4.1.3. Creating preferred futures
4.1.3.1. The overarching idea of the technology curriculum. Teaching students about the benefits and risk of the solutions in technology and having them understand the ways that these solutions can impact on liveability, economic prosperity and environmental sustainability.
5. Aims and objectives
5.1. The Technologies learning area has five key aims that develop the foundation of all the content descriptors from Foundations to Year 10. The five key aims are as followed:
5.1.1. Investigative, design, plan, manage, create and evaluate solutions
5.1.2. Using traditional, contemporary and emerging technologies and understand how technologies have developed over time within a society
5.1.3. Make informed and ethical decisions about the role, impact and use of technologies in the economy, environment and society
5.1.4. Engage confidently with technologies − materials, data, systems, components, tools and equipment − when designing and creating solutions
5.1.5. Critique, analyse and evaluate problems, needs or opportunities to identify and create solutions.
6. Key Concepts
6.1. Digital Technologies
6.1.1. Abstraction
6.1.1.1. Cognitive skill
6.1.1.2. Computational thinking
6.1.1.3. Problem solving
6.1.2. Specification, algorithms, implementation
6.1.2.1. Algorithms how systems work
6.1.3. Implementation
6.1.3.1. Programming
6.1.4. Data Interpretation
6.1.4.1. Patterns
6.1.4.2. Contexts
6.1.5. Data
6.1.5.1. Data collection
6.1.5.2. Data representation