Summary

Invitation from the Chairman of the Board of the Sunrise School, the Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the Director of the Museum of Victoria to Mr David Williams, teacher at Princes Hill High School, Melbourne, to the official launch of the Sunrise School. Senator John Button launched the event on Thursday 30 June 1988. It was originally planned to take place in the Spencer Gallery of the Museum of Victoria, Russell Street, Melbourne but due to inclement weather was relocated to a church hall.

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

A single sheet of light card folded once, printed on the external face with a yellow, blue and black logo of a smiling sun with black text on a yellow background, and on the right half of the inside face with printed text in black ink and handwritten text in blue ink on a white background. The folded document has been two-hole-punched adjacent to it spine.

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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