Informatics: SAT Reflection and Discussion

[Aaron]

Dear Informatics Students,

I'd like to get an idea of what your thoughts are regarding the SAT so far. More importantly, i'd like to ask whether you think this way of assessment and learning is a good way (would you prefer this, as opposed to big chunky SAC's?)

Your comments will definitely be helping me (as a pre-service teacher in a Masters course) understand what way of learning students enjoy most in a subject such as Informatics. Please note there are no right or wrong answers, just type your thoughts :-)

[Kindergarten]

Dear Informatics Students,

I'd like to get an idea of what your thoughts are regarding the SAT so far. More importantly, i'd like to ask whether you think this way of assessment and learning is a good way (would you prefer this, as opposed to big chunky SAC's?)

Your comments will definitely be helping me (as a pre-service teacher in a Masters course) understand what way of learning students enjoy most in a subject such as Informatics. Please note there are no right or wrong answers, just type your thoughts :-)

Honestly I dislike it,

The problem is they have essentially given us a normal sacs worth of work and four weeks to complete it in. So personally i left it until the last week and fininshed it due to lack of motivation during the third week. The other problem I had with it was I study at DECV and they gave us work to do during it, I found this annoying because it felt counter intuative to be doing any work instead of the SAT.

The major problem with work in IT for my friends and I is the work given in IT subjects is too easy and unengaging to bother doing it. This leads to us prioritising anything over it. I found myself doing extra practice essays in the last week of the SAT before i had started the SAT because it was just that unengaging.

Anyway I hope this helps.

[Aaron]

Honestly I dislike it,

The problem is they have essentially given us a normal sacs worth of work and four weeks to complete it in. So personally i left it until the last week and fininshed it due to lack of motivation during the third week. The other problem I had with it was I study at DECV and they gave us work to do during it, I found this annoying because it felt counter intuative to be doing any work instead of the SAT.

The major problem with work in IT for my friends and I is the work given in IT subjects is too easy and unengaging to bother doing it. This leads to us prioritising anything over it. I found myself doing extra practice essays in the last week of the SAT before i had started the SAT because it was just that unengaging.

Anyway I hope this helps.

Thanks heaps for contributing Kindergarten. What you've said about it being 'easy' and 'unengaging' has been a major problem with IT subjects in VCE for a long time now, yet there hasn't been much of a change (some.. but not a lot). The good thing is that there's some progress being made - e.g. focus is starting to be on project planning & project development (not necessarily in Informatics, but other in VCE Computing overall). It also doesn't help that the curriculum is centralised with little room for movement (but I guess this is the same for most subjects too). I have a vision that IT needs to be extremely interactive and contain less 'theoretical' components, but that's just me.

Thanks again.

[JG97]

The SAT was a bugbear, in a lot of ways. I liked gathering data, but the subsequent website building and all the rest of it felt tedious and, frankly, boring. I do agree with Kindergarten's sentiments that IT is 'unengaging' overall, too. I'd much prefer Informatics to be more hands-on instead of theory, theory, theory. (I'll give credit to my Informatics teacher, though. He does try to make the course more engaging, however, it still feels more theoretical than anything else.)
On an unrelated note: wouldn't mind learning the components of a GUI.
-Jonathan

[Aaron]

The SAT was a bugbear, in a lot of ways. I liked gathering data, but the subsequent website building and all the rest of it felt tedious and, frankly, boring. I do agree with Kindergarten's sentiments that IT is 'unengaging' overall, too. I'd much prefer Informatics to be more hands-on instead of theory, theory, theory. (I'll give credit to my Informatics teacher, though. He does try to make the course more engaging, however, it still feels more theoretical than anything else.)
On an unrelated note: wouldn't mind learning the components of a GUI.
-Jonathan

Hi Jonathan - did you find the website development boring due to the fact it didn't interest you, or was it because you already knew how to do these things? Wouldn't it be nice if everything was more hands on! Unfortunately IT ('Informatics' main discipline branch) overall is not really that hands on (even at the university level - most of it is in fact academic, just something we have to get used to).

On an unrelated note: wouldn't mind learning the components of a GUI.

Do you do Softdev as well? Maybe that would have been a better choice for you, given Informatics focuses more on the system side of things, whereas softdev is more the 'programming' side (with Algorithmics being as pure CS as you can get).

Feel free to share your thoughts further about Informatics in general here: Informatics 2016: Questions and Discussion! (This is extended to anyone else reading too!)

Thanks again, and sorry for the delayed reply.