Summary

A booklet describing the Sunrise School, dated 14 March 1988.

The booklet includes an overview of the rationale; a description of its aims and place, its administration, board membership, advisory committee membership, facilities, staffing, participants, activities, research, financial support, schedule of events, and associated projects (the LEGO/Logo Project, the Musum of Victoria database, RMIT/Boxer Project, Monash/CRA Mathematics Centre - Laser Disc Project and others.

It includes a list of sponsors on the back cover and contact details.

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 five sheets of A4 cream-coloured paper, folded and stapled to form a booklet of 20 pages numbered 3 to 23, and bound in cover of yellow paper, all printed with text in black ink. The cover includes a logo with a smiling sun with a blue paper surround glued on to the page.

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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