This element involves students developing inquiry skills.

Students pose questions and identify and clarify information and ideas, and then organise and process information. They use questioning to investigate and analyse ideas and issues, make sense of and assess information and ideas, and collect, compare and evaluate information from a range of sources. In developing and acting with critical and creative thinking, students:

• pose questions

• identify and clarify information and ideas

• organise and process information.

This element involves students creating ideas and actions, and considering and expanding on known actions and ideas.

Students imagine possibilities and connect ideas through considering alternatives, seeking solutions and putting ideas into action. They explore situations and generate alternatives to guide actions and experiment with and assess options and actions when seeking solutions. In developing and acting with critical and creative thinking, students:

• imagine possibilities and connect ideas

• consider alternatives

• seek solutions and put ideas into action.

This element involves students analysing, synthesising and evaluating the reasoning and procedures used to find solutions, evaluate and justify results or inform courses of action.

Students identify, consider and assess the logic and reasoning behind choices. They differentiate components of decisions made and actions taken and assess ideas, methods and outcomes against criteria. In developing and acting with critical and creative thinking, students:

• apply logic and reasoning

• draw conclusions & design a course of action

• evaluate procedures and outcomes.

This element involves students reflecting on, adjusting and explaining their thinking and identifying the thinking behind choices, strategies and actions taken.

Students think about thinking (metacognition), reflect on actions and processes, and transfer knowledge into new contexts to create alternatives or open up possibilities. They apply knowledge gained in one context to clarify another. In developing and acting with critical and creative thinking, students:

• think about thinking (metacognition)

• reflect on processes

• transfer knowledge into new contexts.

Collaboration and teamwork are essential 21C skills and students need to be taught how to work in teams, the advantages of doing so, and the roles of leadership and followership.

· In F-2 students should manage their own role within teams.

· By 3-8 students should take responsibility for specific roles within a project with increasing levels of collaboration and teamwork.

Students should develop an understand that teams bring:

· a broader range of skills;

· a variety of viewpoints and increased adaptability to ways of solving problems;

· can be more efficient - everyone working to their strengths; and

· can build acceptance of diversity and difference.

They should be aware of the challenges of teamwork such as resistance to change, communication difficulties, social dynamics, and general classroom management.

Positive conflict, can lead to healthy competition, spur creativity and motivate students, bring to light and highlight problems, so that they can be addressed, identify issues of importance and passion, and build self-esteem and resilience.

Team formation and dynamics can be challenging for students at all levels, but students should progressively take responsibility for these roles and develop leadership in managing them.

Team selection, based on project needs over social groupings can be supported through application processes, resumes of skills useful to the team in solving problems, assigning team leaders, student selection panels, anonymous voting processes, or external team selection bodies.

Parallels with sport and drama selection processes can assist, where the project goal is the focus.

Collaboration can include seeking out assistance, from another student's, teams, their teacher, other teachers, other adults, experts, and organisations, locally and globally.

Students should gain increasing experience in outsourcing and remixing, allocating some aspects of their project to others, and including the work of others as components of their project.

Project Based Learning is built into the structure of the Technologies curriculum.

Project Based Learning can be approached in several different ways.

· ePBL, where the motivation is extrinsic, external to the student, is represented by worksheets or instruction guides, step by step tutorials, etc. where a problem set by the teacher, instruction guide writer, or tutorial writer, to produce a predetermined solution that students will replicate.

· iPBL, in which the focus is on intrinsic motivation, permits students to choose how they go about solving a problem, with different solutions to their peers, and can also give students the choice of the problem they will solve, and thus have not only different solutions, but solutions to different problems, than their peers.

There will usually be a progression, from ePBL to iPBL as students’ progress in grades through the Digital Technologies curriculum.

· F-2 students plan with teacher support, simple steps and follow directions to complete their own projects or manage their own role within team projects.

· In 3-6 increasing responsibility for specific roles within a project with increasing levels of collaboration and teamwork.

With a shift from teacher to student project management, this changes the role of the teacher in the classroom, from instructor to facilitator.

Student understanding of how ICT can be used in solving problems should also be developed, such as digital timelines for planning and managing project stages, and communication and collaboration tools to manage group work.

Problems should not always be framed as negatives but also opportunities to do new things, be innovative, and entrepreneurial.

Solving for X is a different way of thinking, that attempts to change the world through developing innovative solutions to significant problems, often using the latest new technologies.

· xProblems address huge problems, not simple ones;

· xSolutions propose radical new ways to address xProblems;

· xTechnologies are breakthroughs that permit new opportunities to develop xSolutions to xProblems;

· xProblems develop in scale, from issues affecting themselves, their family, or close friends, to include their classmates, neighbours, school community, local neighbourhood, country, and then to envisioning solutions at an international and global scale;

· xProblems develop in scope, from affecting only themselves, or a few people, to being useful to everyone on earth;

· xProblems develop in time-frame, from solutions to immediate needs, to those in the near future, through to those that may affect them during their lifetime, and then for future generations; and

· xSolutions develop in ambition, from making small incremental changes that slowly improve technologies and processes over time, to big, revolutionary changes.

Moonshot Thinking is envisaging a change that is 10, 100, 1000 times better than currently solutions.

Moon Shot thinking involves risk, they fail, and fail often. Schooling trains students to be risk averse, framing the taking of risks as a negative - especially through assessment. To encourage Moonshot Thinking, assessment should reward risk, and in PBL this is possible, by focusing on the process, rather than the product or solution

Students should be rewarded for identifying risks in the solutions they propose, and for taking them anyway - in the considered hope of overcoming the challenges involved and producing a solution beyond what they are certain of achieving.

Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development theory suggest learning most often occurs when students attempt to do things beyond which they already know how to do.

Teachers should set high expectations to what students might achieve, and assess in ways that reward rather than penalising students doing likewise.

Classrooms can learn from innovative industry practice, where high expectations are set - Moonshots, and while most will fail, through the process involved in trying, the learning that occurs as a result, and the outcomes from those that do succeed, they change the world.

Futures Thinking involves students deliberately considering the future as they would prefer it to be.

Students should develop an understanding that there can be a range of possible futures.

Students should understand that xProblems may prevent their preferred future coming about but that xSolutions may help to bring about their preferred future.

Students should develop the ability to differentiate between predictions as informed guesses about what might happen, and probability as the specific chance of a prediction happening or not.

Students should be able to differentiate between science fiction and reality (science faction), and the process by which ideas envisaged as science fiction may become reality through problem solving.

Environmental scans (researching) of the xProblem students have chosen to address, involves making a list of data and information sources and finding out what is known about the problem from newspapers, books, internet, friends, other students, teachers, their family, local community, or experts in the problem.

Students should develop an understand the power of data in making decisions, identifying what data is available about their problem, and what data is not available (the gaps), and how they can collect their own data on the problem to address these gaps.

Data sources for student Environment Scans should be as varied as possible to develop as complete an understanding of their xProblem as possible, and increasingly involve access to digital data collections, and an appreciation of the advantages to society and organisations in appropriately sharing data, but also when it is inappropriate to make data openly available, and the privacy risks involved in the sharing of personal data.

To be useful data needs to be turned into information so that it can be managed and analysed.

Trends in data collected about xProblems can be represented can be made evident through the use of tools to organise data such as the use of images, wordles, tables, graphs, infographics and other data visualisations.

Students should develop an understanding of how the power of digital technologies increases our ability to collect, manage and analyse data.

Students should progress from representing the same data in different ways on paper in F-2 through to using simple spreadsheets and data tables in 3-6, then to designing and developing information systems in 7-8, and in 9-10, developing online, shared information systems to link live dynamic data sources that are automated and constantly updated.

In F-4 trend data may be collected from friends, family, etc. while for 6-10, exploring xProblems that increase in scale, scope, and timeframe, students should access historical records, online data banks, survey real world communities, and make contact with experts in the xProblem being explored.

Trends are generally seen in data collected over time, such as Climate data, Microchip capabilities, population, etc. but can also exist in other areas such as Fashion and Design. But trends can also occur around the sharing of ideas, memes, news and video e.g. on Twitter, Google, and Youtube.

Once enough data has been collected, it can be extrapolated into the future by continuing the trend line on graphs past the current date. Trend Extrapolation can be linear, seasonal, and cyclical.

Forecasting is a process of predicting the future based on trend analysis, using historical data to determine a direction of future trends.

Preferred futures are the preferences students hold for the future and can be used to inform the creation and evaluation of solutions. Forecasting can be a multi-staged process.

Futures Wheels can be used to structure the forecasting process, starting in the middle with the trend or event associated with their problem, students surround this with possible outcomes that are the result of this trend continuing, and then on the basis of these outcomes, what else may happen if the trend further continues, building out the consequences of trends in concentric circles.

With the futures wheel developed, it should be possible to look around the circumference and indicate which of these future outcomes students would most like to see occur, which they would least like to see occur, and the ones they think might be most likely to occur.

Students should consider the possible consequences and sustainability of the solutions that they develop for their xProblems.

Forecasting is most useful in developing solutions to solvable challenges - ones that we understand well, and know how to solve, but which require an understanding of the trends involved.

Forecasts should strive to be:

• Plausible: Logical, consistent and believable;

• Relevant: Highlighting key challenges and dynamics of the future;

• Divergent: Different from each other in strategically significant ways; and

• Challenging: Questioning fundamental beliefs and assumptions.

Forecasting and scenarios are very useful in exploring what may happen but less so in determining how to make these future possibilities occur.

This is especially true for wicked problems, ones that we don’t understand, and where starting from where we are has not led to solutions.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

Backcasting is a process of deconstructing the narratives developed for scenarios, and developing the steps required to bring such scenarios about.

Backcasting is a method in which the preferred future is envisioned and then the steps defined to attain it, rather than taking steps that are a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future.

Backcasting uses the digital technologies process of decomposition in which large complex problems are broken down to the point at which they become understood and manageable.

When students are unable to identify a process to go from the present to a preferred future scenario, by breaking the process down into simpler, and simpler steps, until ways of moving between each step is achievable, a solution to otherwise intractable problems may be found.

Tables, graphs, infographics, and live data ‘dashboards’ can help students represent and better understanding how changes to some data affect others, and how collections of data can show relationships between data.

Systems Thinking provides another way in which students can view the world, and address problems in new ways.

By students seeing problems as part of a system, or more likely several interrelated systems, they can then develop an understanding of how these systems work, the stocks and flows involved, the causal relationships between such elements, and then model and simulate the system to explore how changes in the variables in the system effect the problem they are exploring.

Students should recognise that no system model will be entirely accurate, as it cannot replicate the fill complexity of the real world, but it still can provide insight into the problem and how changes to the system could be brought about, as a solution to the problem.

Systems change by their very nature, and understanding this change over time is a fundamental aspect of systems thinking.

Students will have many personal experiences of thing changing over time and they can collect this data and represent it using graphs, infographics, and in databases.

System involve:

• aspects that change over time;

• how these changed over time;

• the period the change occurred; and

• if the change is constant, increasing, decreasing or fluctuating.

Once graphed many of these aspects will become obvious, and students can consider what may have caused any changes in direction or slope, they can also consider what may happen in the future – extrapolating the change and developing trends.

If several things to do with their problem are changing, they can explore the relationships between different graphs - the interdependencies or causal relationships.

Students should develop an understanding that systems are dynamic, changing, and changing other systems and subsystem continuously. This makes understanding any particular system, related to the problem they are trying to solve, more difficult, but digital technologies can assist in this, one of the most powerful uses for digital technologies is in simulating aspects of the world - we do this in finance, weather prediction, science, computer games, and many educational applications. Students can use digital technologies to create their own models of the real world, and the systems they are trying to understand in order to solve their problem.

Feedback loops can be connected together and interact.

There are two types of feedback loops: balancing and reinforcing.

More complex loops can have several steps in the cycle.

A loop can be identified as reinforcing or balancing by counting the number of negative connections, if it is an odd number - it will be a balancing loop, otherwise a reinforcing loop.

Stock flow diagrams can become quite complex, and involve many loops.

Connection circle are an alternative way of identifying feedback loops.

Stock flow maps are the most involved, and provide detailed understanding of the changes involved.

Connection circles can be created much quicker, but may only provide a basic understanding.

Connection circles are formed by identifying and placing around the circumference, all of the elements involved in a system. Then arrowed lines are drawn showing how elements affect one another, with + and - labels for positive and negative effects. From this, loops can be identified, and feedback or causal loops generated.

Using these two techniques, stock flow maps, and connection circles, students should be able to quickly generate causal feedback loops to better understand the systems that they are exploring related their problems.

Feedback loops allow students to identify those aspects of the system they are exploring that can be improved or changed by the use of digital technologies and approach solutions to their xProblems in ways not previously considered.

Stocks are the foundation of any system - they are what you can see, feel, count or measure - but they do not have to be physical.

In system models, stocks can be things such as water in reservoirs or a bathtub, money, air quality, animal populations, human populations, but can also include immaterial things such as confidence, fear, patience or hope - as long as they can be measured and change.

Change can result in stocks increasing, decreasing, or oscillating up and down.

Change in stock over time is through the action of a flow within a system, for example in a bathtub, we have an inflow through a faucet, and an outflow through a drain. If the flow in is greater than the flow out, the stock will increase, if less, then the stock of water in the tub will decrease.

Stock and flow can be used to understand many systems, including those in stories and other learning areas. Flow models are used to represent and better understand what is occurring over time.

Stock and flow models can be used to identify the loops formed when changes in stock change the flow in and out of that same stock, and do so in two forms:

• Balancing: in which a feedback loop acts to try and keep a stock within a certain range; and

• Reinforcing: where the stock can increase or decrease exponentially.

Simple Feedback loops can be seen in many real world problems.

World population, avalanches, Epidemics, rumours, fads, interest rates, confidence, soil fertility, predator-prey systems, exercise, supply and demand, fire management, cruise control.

Simulations

Causal loops provide a useful visualisation of dynamic systems, and systems described by causal loops can be modelled as dynamic simulations.

Simulations allow students to model real world processes over time, and gain greater insight into problems than static models can provide - especially in the interactions between systems.

Simulation models can be used by students to make predictions of what will occur in their models before running them, and comparing predictions vs model results.

Simulation modelling can help students understand the complexity of the real world, and support the development of students’ system thinking - where they can see and understand the various interconnected systems involved in any real world problem, and seek out the ways in which they can develop solutions to such problem by understanding that their solutions will change one or more elements of the system.