LEARNING FRONTIERS

SOLVING REAL
WORLD PROBLEMS
The very real value of the tech team became apparent
recently, when a serious technical problem occurred
in the back office support for BYOD. More than 250
devices being used across the school couldn’t ‘speak
to’ the platform designed to support them. As a result
the entire school’s ICT system was grinding to a halt on
a Friday afternoon. It was inconvenient from a practical
point of view but, equally important, all the hard work
that had been done to secure funding and build
confidence in the BYOD approach was at risk. So it was
important to find a fix, and to find it fast.
At 08:15 on Monday morning, 10 of the student tech
team gathered together. They applied design-thinking
approaches they’d learned in school and brought
all their talent and experience to bear to ‘hack’ the
problem, which they dubbed ‘the dinosaur of death’.
A hack or hackathon is an event in which a
multidisciplinary group collaborates intensively on a
shared problem or project. Usually applied to software
design or development, hacking is now used as part of
the language to describe design thinking and practice.
In Amaroo the students were so motivated by their
‘dinosaur of death’ hack and its outcome that they are
now developing a toolkit for other students to use to
apply the hack method for solving other problems.
Within an hour the students had come up with: a fix
for the 250 devices; a way to roll out the fix across the
school; and a prototype for making the fix sustainable
through automatic updates. Within four days all 250
devices had been successfully reimaged.
“As well as being extremely proud of (and
grateful to!) the team, I was fascinated to see
how the experience bonded them as a group.
They took what they’d learned about design
thinking and made it real; made it authentically
their own.”
Andrew Beecher, Teacher, Amaroo School
“Tech is going to be a big part of society and it
will be really important to us when we go to the
College (Gungahlin College). We’re hoping to
establish ourselves as part of the tech crew in
the school. So when a student or a teacher has
a problem they’ll come to us, rather than waiting
for just the one or two teachers who can help
them.
The project has lots of potential. We want to
expand to include students from other year
groups and attend more of the ACT Education
Services meetings. We were the first students to
be invited to that.”
Student, Amaroo School
A WINDOW INTO WORK
The student tech team is working alongside the ACT
Government Shared Services team and the Education
Directorate Digital Learning Team to test and debug
new apps in the GAFE platform.
Andrew Beecher, who facilitates the tech team,
sees this as just one examples of the way in which
this experience will be valuable to the students beyond
school: “The skills I see these students developing are
going to be a great stepping stone towards careers
in the IT industry, and my goal is to give them as much
real life experience and exposure as they can possibly
get.”
EVIDENCE
The ability for learners
to see connections and
“horizontal connectedness”
between the formal learning
environment and the wider
environment and society is
important. The “authentic
learning” this promotes fosters
deeper understanding.
OECD 2012
LEARNING FRONTIERS Insights & Ideas 4 31