Summary

An invitation to Sunrise School Day '88, Melbourne, to be held at Museum of Victoria, on Monday 12 Dec 1988.

This was an event organised by the Board of the Sunrise School in conjunction with the Museum of Victoria to report on the school's activities of that year, provide information about various projects and present the program for 1989.

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 white A4 paper with text printed on one side in black ink, folded in half and glued inside a folded cover of light card printed with a yellow, blue and black logo of a smiling sun accompanied by text in black ink on a bright yellow background

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 this historical context, three features of the Sunrise Collection establish its significance.

First, the collection preserves some key technical hardware that was actually deployed in educational settings during this nascent period of computer education in Australia. Second, 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. Third, 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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