Information Technology

ROB CLEGG

Head of 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.

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. 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.

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.

A second elective subject in Year 10 was ITS/Robotics. In this subject students developed their skills in design, developing and evaluating in the context of writing Robot C programs to control their Lego Mindstorms NXT robots. They learnt the theory of problem-solving techniques and programming structures. The students were then able to create and program robots to perform a wide variety of tasks.

The senior subject offered to students by the department is Information Technology Systems. Information Technology Systems (ITS) is a practical discipline that prepares students to respond to emerging digital technologies and information technology trends.

The Year 11 ITS students developed skills in graphic design for both electronic and print media, and learnt to work with Adobe Fireworks and inDesign. In Semester Two, students worked on Flash animation and using Actionscript to develop their own interactive learning object. Year 12 ITS covered website design in Semester 1 and game design in Semester 2. Students learnt html code and CSS, developed an ePortfolio and created 2D and 3D games in Unity.

My thanks to the teachers in the department, Mr Bryce Goldburg and Mr Kesh Chinia, particularly in how they continue to develop resources for their classes and to keep up to date with changing technologies. My thanks also go to Mr Lockett for his assistance in the robotics components of the senior courses.