Information and Software Technology

The Nature of the Course

The workforce of the future will require highly developed levels of digital literacy and computational thinking. The development of an informed awareness of the capacities, scope, limitations and implications of hardware and software systems is fundamental to today’s students.

The study of Information and Software Technology assists students to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills to solve problems in real life contexts. Through experiential and collaborative tasks, students engage in processes of analysing, designing, producing, testing, documenting, implementing and evaluating information and software technology-based solutions.

The majority of the course work in I&ST is presented through projects, which allows individual responses and encourage responsibility for learning. In Year 10, we intend to integrate the course work into an alternate reality game design project.

TOPICS COVERED IN THE COURSE MAY INCLUDE:

• the Internet and website development

• robotics and automated systems

• digital media that is fit for purpose, i.e. 3D printing

• software development and programming

• authoring and multimedia; creating virtual tours or virtual world

• documentation methods and structures

• network security

• artificial intelligence.

Students learn to: manage computer hardware and software, design, produce and evaluate a website for a given purpose, develop and design a robotic or automated product that incorporate 3D printed components, work with existing code to identify data types and control structures, leading to the development of algorithm descriptions, develop programming skills to create a software game, virtual tour or virtual world and manage projects and document their development process.