Teachers should establish if students have developed robust level seven understandings and are ready to begin working towards level eight achievement objectives for technological knowledge and plan learning experiences to progress these as guided by the level eight Indicators below.

Technological Modelling

Technological Products

Technological Systems

Achievement Objective

Students will:

• Understand the role of technological modelling as a key part of technological development, justifying its importance on moral, ethical, sustainable, cultural, political, economic, and historical grounds.

Achievement Objective

Students will:

• Understand the concepts and processes employed in materials development and evaluation and the implications of these for design, development, maintenance, and disposal of technological products.

Achievement Objective

Students will:

• Understand operational parameters and their role in the design, development, and maintenance of technological systems.

Teacher Guidance

To support students to develop understanding of technological modelling at level 8, teachers could:

• support students to develop a critical and informed understanding of why technological modelling is an important aspect for ensuring responsible and defensible decisions are made during the design, development and any subsequent manufacturing of Technological Outcomes.
• support students to critically analyse examples of technological modelling practices that were undertaken to address a range of competing and contestable factors to gain insight into how these factors can be handled. These factors arise from such things as differing moral, ethical, cultural, and/or political views and the way in which people adhere to and understand issues such as sustainability, globalisation, democracy, global warming etc. Examples should include the modelling practices of technologists and should include instances where modelling was undertaken to deal with competing and contestable factors.

Teacher Guidance

To support students to develop understanding of technological products at level 8, teachers could:

• support students to understand that material evaluation enables decisions to be made about what material would be optimal to ensure the fitness for purpose when taking into account both the technical feasibility and social acceptability of the product;
• support students to critically analyse a range of subjective and objective evaluative procedures used to justify material suitability and to explain the underpinning concepts and processes involved in these procedures;
• support students to understand why the selection of appropriate material evaluation procedures relies on understanding the composition and structure of materials, how their properties can be enhanced through manipulation or transformation, the performance criteria required by technological products and an understanding of the physical and social context within which the technological product will be situated;
• support students to understand that the development of new materials relies on understanding: existing materials including their advantages and limitations; new material composition and structure possibilities; formulation procedures; future requirements, needs and desires; and an awareness that new evaluative procedures may need to be developed to determine the suitability of new materials;
• support students to identify and analyse examples where new materials have been developed, including past and contemporary examples, to gain insight into how material formulation and subsequent evaluation procedures are used to address performance, maintenance and disposal implications and inform design and development decisions. Examples should include material development (including formulation procedures) and evaluation practices of technologists.

Teacher Guidance

To support students to develop understanding of technological systems at level 8, teachers could:

• support students to understand what operational parameters are and the role they play in the design, development and maintenance of technological systems. Operational parameters refer to the boundaries and/or conditions within which the system has been designed to function and are influenced by a number of factors associated with the technical feasibility and social acceptability of the system;
• support students to identify and differentiate highly complex systems. Highly complex systems include self-regulatory and intelligent systems. Self regulatory systems are those that have been designed to adjust the functioning of transformation processes in response to feedback from any part of the system to produce desirable and known outputs. Intelligent systems have been designed to adapt to environmental inputs in ways that change the nature of the system components and/or transformation processes in known and unknown ways to produce desirable but unspecified outputs;
• support students to identify and analyse a range of technological systems including simple, complex and highly complex technological systems;
• support students to use examples to gain insight into underpinning operational parameters and how these have impacted on and been influenced by system design, development and maintenance decisions. Examples should include system design, development and maintenance practices of technologists.

Indicators

Students can:

• explain the role of technological modelling in making informed, responsive and defensible design and development decisions
• explain the role of technological modelling in making informed, responsive and defensible manufacturing decisions
• discuss examples to illustrate a range of technological modelling practices that have been undertaken in situations with competing and contestable factors
• critique examples of technological modelling practices in terms of how well they address underpinning factors.

Indicators

Students can:

• discuss examples of the formulation of new materials and explain the underpinning concepts and processes involved in their development;
• discuss examples of evaluation procedures undertaken to determine the suitability of new materials and explain the underpinning concepts and processes involved in particular evaluations;
• discuss examples of past material developments and explain how these impacted on product design, development, manufacturing, maintenance and disposal;
• discuss examples of contemporary material developments and suggest probable implications for future technological product design, development, manufacturing, maintenance and disposal.

Indicators

Students can:

• explain what operational parameters are in relation to technological systems;
• explain the operational parameters established for particular technological systems and explain the factors that influenced these;
• discuss examples of technological systems to illustrate how operational parameters impacted on system design, development and maintenance;
• discuss examples of simple, complex and highly complex technological systems to illustrate the demands that increasing complexity in system design requires in terms of establishing operational parameters.