Supporting Learning Environment Level 2

To support students to develop understanding of technological systems at level 2, teachers could:

• provide students with the opportunity to identify that simple technological systems are systems that have been designed to change inputs to outputs through a single transformation process
• provide students with a range of simple technological systems and encourage them to explore these through such things as: using, ‘playing’, dismantling and rebuilding as appropriate
• guide student to understand the role of each component and to identify the changes that are occurring in the transformation process
• guide students to understand that sometimes transformation processes may be difficult to determine or understand and these can be represented as a ‘black box’. That is, a black box is described as a way of depicting a part of a system where the inputs and outputs are known but the transformation process is not known.

Describe the change that has occurred to the input to produce the output in simple technological systems

Provide simple systems that students are familiar with and explore and identify what happens to make the change from input to output

Teachers explain the changes in simple terms (e.g. flow chart) using technological language to describe component parts (e.g. for a simple mechanical toy, hand egg beater, pasta maker)

Introduce non electronic systems

Technology student website - Mechanisms

Technology student website -Gears and pulleys

Students arrange photographs of component parts of a simple system into sequence

Identify the role each component has in allowing the inputs to be transformed into outputs within simple technological systems

Students disassemble a simple system (like a torch) to identify each component and what it does

Teachers assist students to make links to the technological products activities at level 2 and use the appropriate descriptive language for systems