Information Technology The Information Technology department aims to give its students skills and knowledge to design, develop and evaluate digital solutions for current and future needs. Digital technologies allow students to be creative and at the same time demand attention to detail. The department runs classes in the Senior School for all year levels from Year 7 to Year 12. In Years 7 and 8, all students undertake a rotation of approximately 12 to 13 weeks in Information and Communications Technology.
ROB CLEGG
Head of Information Technology
The elective subject of Digital Design was again offered to our Year 9 students. This full-year course covered the units of Graphic Design, Capturing and Manipulating Digital Still Images, Enhancing the User Experience with Adobe Flash, Digital Narratives using Adobe Flash, Digital Video: Foundations of Video Design and Production and Web Design. This course has built on the graphic design and animation skills learnt in Year 8.
The Year 7 students were introduced to Flash Creative Cloud to create their own digital graphics and animations, after which they created animations and games in Scratch. The course stressed independent learning and creativity and set the students up for further studies in graphic design and game design.
In Year 8, the main component taught was Flash animation. The students were first taught the rudiments of the drawing tools and the Flash workspace, as well as some basic actionscripting and simple buttons. The students were then challenged to make their own animation as well as an ‘Escape the room’ game in Flash. They had to carefully work their way through a detailed tutorial to produce their game. Many students then went beyond the scope of the tutorial, creating interesting room variations and interactivity.
Another elective subject, ICT, was offered to the students in Year 10. The ICT course was designed to be a more general IT course to develop skills used across a range of career choices. The course covered graphic design, Flash animation and webpages. In Flash, students were able to learn some more advanced techniques and were given the opportunity to create their own Flash game. In the webpage unit, students were given an overview of current web design trends and then went on to design and build their own websites.
THE SOUTHPORT SCHOOL SOUTHPORTONIAN 2015
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