School hardware and software

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Know what you are looking for? Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. Digital games are a form of software that allow the user to interact with a virtual world. Photo editing software enables the user to add effects to their photos. Music software allows users to create and record music. Suggested approaches may include Software icons matched to a purpose.

Activity Use familiar software What software can I use? Suggested approaches may include Completed task showing the use of a particular software application Work samples Presentation: Systems Throughout the term, students were introduced to various digital systems and their use.

Students were asked to identify software and hardware then demonstrate how to use a digital system for a specific purpose at school. Activity Make a model How can I make a model of a digital system? My First Computer My First Computer is an introduction to the amazing and complicated machine that is the computer.

Make a keyboard In this exercise, students build their own computer keyboard. They also learn about alphabets, numbers, and symbols. Suggested approaches may include Presentation of model of a digital system for a particular purpose. Subscribe to our email newsletter. Whole-school approaches Create a whole-school plan School stories. Lessons and ideas Scope and sequence for F—10 learning programs Search Lesson plans.

Assessment Planning for assessment Unpacking assessment Guides and templates. Inclusive curriculum Digital Technologies for all Disability categories Inclusive lesson ideas. Professional learning Webinars Professional associations. Technologies resourcing Tech4DT. Related careers Careers. Coding and games Play around. Creative Commons Attribution 4. There is no set list of devices that are learned about, however they will generally be the ones in this table: An example of an activity that may be run at both KS1 and KS2 would be to have the physical devices from the table above laid out on a table.

In corners of the room or on multi-coloured boxes a teacher may place labels for inputs, outputs, processing devices and storage. The students will then have to look at each physical device, select what it is and the device's function and finally decide which category it belongs to.

Your child may understand that programming is linked to software, as when they write basic programs for a turtle robot they are effectively writing software for it. The code written for software, whilst extremely valuable to whoever wrote it, is completely useless until run on a computer. In other words, software isn't the code it's written in but the result of having that code running on our computer, asking for input and showing output to the screen.

This is an exceedingly difficult concept, so until KS2 children's understanding of software is not developed much further than a description and some examples. Even at KS2, the idea does not go much beyond this, but as long as students are learning about software hand in hand with algorithms and programming, then the foundation knowledge required to understand what software is starts to develop. Whilst there are no set tasks that can be used to teach students about software, as students start to write more and more code their understanding of software being something they can build and hardware being something that is a physical object will develop naturally and will be reiterated multiple times by teachers throughout their early computing.

An operating system OS is generally described as a translator, however it is actually a very large and complicated piece of software. Its main job is to allow communication between the different parts of a computer. The UI is what allows us to communicate with a computer by showing us information and giving us things to click. If we want to go on the Internet then by clicking on the Internet Explorer icon the OS will load the browser for us and show it on screen.

When you click inside the Internet Explorer window the OS tells the program, allowing it to then calculate what it should do next. When the program makes changes it then asks the OS to show these changes on the screen.

This is introduced very simply at KS1 level through a series of tasks that will have your child perform basic functions on the computer, such as loading programs and using menus. At KS2 this learning will be taken further and the concept of the OS being a translator will be introduced more thoroughly.

An example of an OS learning activity at KS2 would be to have students stand up at the front of the class and be given a role. For example, one student could draw a picture, one student could provide pieces of paper, one student could be a communicator and one student could be a middleman for the other three. They communicate with all the other members of the team components of the computer and deal with all requests and communication. In a computer they could be the mouse, receiving a request to start drawing on the screen.

In a computer this could be the screen. When the middleman asks whether there is paper available this could be the OS checking that there is nothing else on screen.