Year 10 Digital Technologies

Year 10 Digital Technologies

Learning in Digital Technologies focuses on further developing understanding and skills in computational thinking such as precisely and accurately describing problems and the use of modular approaches to solutions. It also focuses on engaging students with specialised learning in preparation for vocational training or learning in the senior secondary years. Students will challenged to analyse problems and design, implement and evaluate a range of digital solutions, such as database-driven websites and artificial intelligence engines and simulations.

Content

Students will be asked to investigate the role of hardware and software in managing, controlling and securing the movement of and access to data in networked digital systems. They will be challenged to:

• explain how an operating system manages the relationship between hardware, applications and system software

• compare the similarities and differences of two operating systems

• identify how changes to the configuration of an operating system change the operation of hardware and software components in a network digital system

• explain the role of hardware and software components in allowing people to interact with digital systems, for example using a mouse or touchpad or screen, speech, accelerometer

• investigate the operation and use of robotic process control systems

• explain encryption of data as a means of protecting data, for example secret keys and ‘exclusive or’ (XOR) and hashing algorithms to digitally sign data

• analyse simple compression of data and how content data are separated from presentation

• explain how simple compression schemes reduce the size of repetitive data, for example how run length encoding reduces the size of images

• explain the difference between lossy and lossless compression, for example the difference between JPEG and PNG images

 
Assessment

Assessment includes digital projects and an investigation.