Structure

The Australian Curriculum: Technologies Foundation – Year 10 comprises two subjects:

Design and Technologies
Digital Technologies.

The Australian Curriculum: Technologies is written on the basis that all students will study the two subjects from Foundation to the end of Year 8.

In Year 9 and 10, student access to technologies subjects will be determined by school authorities. These could include Design and Technologies and/or Digital Technologies as outlined in the Australian Curriculum: Technologies and/or subjects relating to specific technologies contexts, determined by state and territory school authorities or individual schools.

The curriculum for each of Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies describes the distinct knowledge, understanding and skills of the subject and, where appropriate, highlights their similarities and complementary learning. This approach allows students to develop a comprehensive understanding of traditional, contemporary and emerging technologies. It also provides the flexibility – especially in the primary years of schooling – for developing integrated teaching programs that focus on both Technologies subjects and other learning areas. Figure 1 shows the relationship between the overarching idea, key ideas and subjects of the Technologies learning area.

Figure 1: Relationship between key ideas and Technologies subjects

The curriculum for each Technologies subject is written in bands of year levels:

Foundation – Year 2
Years 3 and 4
Years 5 and 6
Years 7 and 8
Years 9 and 10.

Strands

Knowledge, understanding and skills in each subject are presented through two related strands:

Knowledge and understanding
Processes and production skills.

Table 1 outlines the focus of knowledge, understanding and skills across the Technologies learning area Foundation – Year 10.

Table 1: Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies content structure

Design and Technologies	Digital Technologies
Knowledge and understanding	Knowledge and understanding
Technologies and society the use, development and impact of technologies in people’s lives Technologies contexts technologies and design across a range of technologies contexts	Digital systems the components of digital systems: hardware, software and networks and their use Representation of data how data are represented and structured symbolically
Processes and production skills	Processes and production skills
Creating designed solutions by: investigating and defining generating and designing producing and implementing evaluating collaborating and managing	Collecting, managing and analysing data Creating digital solutions by: investigating and defining generating and designing producing and implementing evaluating collaborating and managing

Teachers can select technologies-specific content from the Knowledge and understanding strand and students can apply skills from the Processes and production skills strand to that content.

The common strand structure provides an opportunity to highlight similarities across the two subjects that will facilitate integrated approaches to teaching.