Summary

A booklet, entitled 'The Sunrise School Day '88', Melbourne, 1988', describing the status at the end of 1988 of the joint program known as the 'Sunrise School'.

This project was a joint project between the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the Museum of Victoria to develop a model of teaching for students to use new information and communication technologies.

The booklet summarised related activities in 1988, provided a bibliography of papers, described new Sunrise Centres, described the 'Boxer' computational environment developed by Andrea diSessa and Harold Abelson, described the Sunrise School music project of Kevin Purcell and Andrew Brown as well as the 'Australia's Biggest Family Photo Album', overseen by Euan McIllivary, Museum of Victoria, and 'Supermap'.

The booklet includes the Sunrise School's outreach program for 1989, a list of participants at the Sunrise School Day held at Museum of Victoria on 12 December, 1989 and the program for that day.

The booklet includes three photographs; 'Dr Ocko, demonstrating LEGO-Logo technology' and two of unidentified young students with technical computing devices.

This object forms part of the Sunrise Collection which includes educational robots, software and multimedia recordings of teachers and students, mainly in Victoria, exploring new possibilities with computer programming. 'Computational thinking' in a constructionist environment was emerging in Victoria throughout the 1980s and 90s.

Physical Description

An A5-sized booklet of six white A4 paper sheets, folded and stapled at the fold to form 24 pages with text printed in black on all faces. There are three black-and-white photographs and one diagram set in the text.

Significance

The Sunrise Collection is comprised of microcomputer and robotics hardware and software as well as audio-visual and print materials that document their use as educational technologies by students and teachers in schools and other education settings during the 1980s and early 1990s. Although a very small number of Australian schools had explored computing as part of their educational offerings in the 1970s, it was during the 1980s, driven by technological innovation in micro computing and developments in computer education policies and funding, that computers and computing became a common feature of Australian schools. In historical context, three features of the Sunrise Collection establish its significance.

Firstly, the collection preserves some key technical hardware that was actually deployed in educational settings during this nascent period of computer education in Australia.
Secondly, the collection documents how teachers, students and other stakeholders responded to and reflected upon their engagement with these technologies at the time. The images in particular capture the early experience of computers for students from a diversity of educational environments; Geelong Grammar preparatory school, MLC, Yooralla, Princes Hill Secondary School and Victorian Aboriginal Educational Association run camps.
Thirdly, the collection documents the development and implementation of a particular exploratory and progressive approach to educational computing in Australia. This 'Sunrise' approach challenged policy makers and educators to think of computers as presenting an opportunity to radically reform practices of learning and teaching rather than simply being a new technology to be integrated into existing practice.

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