Announcing our new industry-focused Year 9 course
In partnership with our industry partners, we are pleased to announce that we’re launching a new Year 9 elective for 2021.
This Year 9 elective builds on the coding experiences of the Year 7 & 8 CS in Schools programmes. However, this time, students will take their skills to the real world. This elective involves students being set a challenge by industry powerhouses, including Domain and Carsales. These real-world problems need to be analysed and researched and then solutions need to be designed and created by students!
Students will work in a startup squad over the semester to find and create the best solution to the industry challenge. They will then get the opportunity to pitch your solutions to the company itself. Throughout the semester, students will have access to an industry mentor for their squad, and teachers will be supported and mentored by CS in Schools volunteer computing professionals to develop their skills in leading student squads through the software development lifecycle.
This unit involves:
- A semester long programme of end-to-end delivery of a product from research to creation
- The further development of coding skills to solve real world problems
- Scaffolded problems of varying difficulty to support learners at different stages and with different interests
- Weekly connection with a mentor from industry (such as Domain or Carsales) to help in the process
- An emphasis on product management and presentation skills to bring ideas to life for teams, companies, and the user
- An end of semester experience at the company itself to bring the solution to industry
We’re excited about this next step in our journey to create sustainable change in Australian digital technology education and can’t wait to work with our friends at Domain and Carsales in 2021!