Digital Technology

Welcome to the Digital Technologies Department. All students at St Bernard’s College will study this vibrant and relevant curriculum area. The students won’t just be using devices like computers and smartphones. We will be introducing them to ideas relating to computational thinking and designing and developing digital outcomes.

Computational thinking is about understanding the computer science principles that underlie all digital technologies, and learning how to develop instructions, such as programming, to control these technologies.

Designing and developing digital outcomes is about understanding that digital systems and applications are created for humans by humans, and developing knowledge and skills in using different digital technologies to create digital content across a range of digital media. This part of the curriculum also includes learning about the electronic components and techniques used to design digital devices.

Junior Digital Technologies

Students will be introduced to computational thinking, coding and developing digital outcomes. Software students will encounter include Adobe Photoshop, block programming, python, brackets for editing HTML and CSS, Microsoft Office suite, Google G Suite. Use of this software enables students to develop their knowledge, skills and competence to create outcomes, communicate, research and develop ideas and build websites. Students will also be involved in developing understanding about robotics mainly through the Arduino interface. Access to 3D printing is also available and we currently utilize Tinkercad for this design work.

Students are encouraged to develop their ability to choose appropriate software tools when developing outcomes and develop the ability to evaluate theirs and other pupils’ outcomes.

The computational thinking aspect of the course will develop pupils ability to critically think and solve problems.

All St Bernard’s College students have their own login to the school network where they are able to access relevant software and the internet. All students also have access to our Google G Suite domain. Students are also able to access Microsoft 365.

Senior Digital Technologies

At St Bernard’s College the digital technologies curriculum has been developed to embrace the achievement standards recently developed for digital technologies. The core aspects of our work at senior level revolve around developing computational thinking and designing and developing digital outcomes. Our current programme will focus on web design using html and advanced CSS to create responsive websites; database design and development and complex programming utilizing (initially block based languages at Level 1) Python as the key language of instruction.

Information on the Course Structure can be found here.