School Assessed Task

Developing your SAT proposal

SAT requires you to identify a need or opportunity that can be solved as a software solution. You may reach out to relatives, other teachers, local businesses or community groups to determine the need or opportunity. Doing this provides you with a client from whom to seek feedback and clarification throughout the process.

• •  You need to find a REAL need or opportunity that you will then address by developing a software solution

  •  You will need to develop a Design Brief which you will present to your teacher for consideration. 

When your proposal is accepted by your teacher you will work through the Problem Solving Methodology to:

• • Produce a project plan (including a Gantt chart) to manage your SAT

  • Complete an analysis that defines the requirements, constraints and scope of a solution in the form of a software requirements specification (SRS)

  • Design a folio of alternative design ideas (at least 3), criteria for assessing designs, and detailed design specifications of the preferred design

  • Develop a software solution that meets the software requirements specification

  • Evaluate your software solution and the process you went through to produce it

Assessment

As a SAT, your work needs to be authenticated. As part of this, all of your code will be kept under version control (either through a VCS or dated backups). 

All documentation will be completed in the provided Google Doc template on Google Classroom and submitted at teacher provided milestones.

Your Project Plan will need to be regularly updated - archived versions should be attached to the Classroom assignment.

The SAT is marked using rubrics provided by VCAA. For each of the Assessment Criteria, the student must provide evidence. Working down the page the evidence is then checked against the Performance Descriptors with those that best describes the student's achievement being selected. When all the Descriptors have been reviewed the assessor then looks at the completed page and chooses the most suitable overall Level of Performance for that Criteria by giving a score out of ten.

Note on development methodology

The assessment structure (especially the U3O2, U401 split) can be seen to require a fairly waterfall-ish approach to development. However, there is room within the external milestones (due dates) to be more flexible / agile.

As you are not highly experienced software developers, it is hard to know what is possible and to accurately plan. This means 

1. you can and should be starting coding and trying quick ideas in the first part of the SAT - some of this can feed into your design selection process

2. you are definitely allowed to modify your plan during the second part of the SAT. Any modifications to your plan will then form part of your evaluation process at the end - i.e., give you something to talk about in the final criteria!