Exchange gives IT real-life context

For 36 years, Cheltenham Secondary College students have shared some friendly rivalry with their peers from Windsor Gardens Vocational College in South Australia. An annual exchange program involving students in a challenging array of academic, sporting, drama and music competitions has been hotly contested in a bid to claim the perpetual trophy. But the program is also serving up new challenges to VCE IT students whose Unit 4 Information Processing and Management (IPM) studies are bringing home the level of organisation involved in staging such an event. Cheltenham learning technologies coordinator Stephen Digby uses the program as a basis for the assessment task for Outcome 1 in the School Assessed Coursework component. Mr Digby said it was good to choose a context from students’ experience for the assessment task so that all students could quickly comprehend it. In his case, students will create a database that will be used to coordinate next year’s exchange program. Mr Digby said the task helped students meet Outcome 1 requirements of:

• Analysing a situation;
• Identifying goals;
• Developing a project management plan;
• Designing, testing and annotating a working software solution;
• Documenting how the solution should be used; and
• Evaluating how well the solution meets the goals.

The college’s IPM students will start this term with a sequence of learning activities that Mr Digby said would “mimic the assessment task in style and technical requirements, but with different contexts”.
Students will start building their skills by studying completed databases, such as MS Access ‘Wizard’ databases and others, before moving on to create their own versions of commonly used relational databases such as those used in doctors’ surgeries or for ticket sales, book and video loans. “This gives them the experience of different contexts so they have a past repertoire to draw on when faced with the assessment task,” Mr Digby said. “Students also need exposure to a repertoire of complex aspects of software so that they realise that they should search for them when learning new software in the future.” Mr Digby said the biggest challenge in Outcome 1 was providing students with enough hands-on experience so that they were motivated to learn the more theoretical aspects of the task. Mr Digby contributes IT classroom materials to the IPM teachers mailing list coordinated by Forest Hill College which teachers can join free at: www.fhc.vic.edu.au/lists
The IT study design is being reviewed by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) in recognition of rapidly changing technology, students’ increasing skill levels, new training programs and more specialised career options.
CONTACT: Stephen Digby 9555 5955 digby.stephen.p@edumail.vic.gov.au www.fhc.vic.edu.au/lists