Week 6: Target audience research: Interview with a teacher

One piece of feedback following our presentation of Part A was around the appropriateness of our target audience.  While I had intended to talk to a teacher before hand, I had run out of time.  Given this feedback, it became necessary as the curriculum did not give the whole picture, and a lot of the conversation we have had about the age-group revolved around anecdotal evidence.

To gain more insight on our potential audience and how our product could be used, I interviewed a high school information technology (IT) teacher who teaches grades 7-12.  Their experiences include teaching at a co-ed independent school, a state school and being involved in an Education Queensland monitoring program for IT subjects across a selection of schools (colloquially known as 'panel').

During my research, I had looked at the ACARA curriculum for Digital Technologies to see where HTML and CSS were taught. By speaking to a current teacher with first-hand experience, I was able to find more information of how this played out in a classroom.

Here are the main points from my interview.

• The National Curriculum (NC)is still in draft, but any curriculum is only used as a guideline.  The curriculum provides the framework and topics but the depth varies between schools and resources.
• Some GPS schools are very well resourced with IT teachers and teach in-depth HTML, CSS and Javascript.
• At their current school, they do not teach multimedia/IT in grade 7 and 8 but will be moving in that direction sometime in the future, possibly to align with NC.
• In grades 9 and 10 (junior) they teach a combined multimedia/IT subject and in grades 11 and 12 (senior) it is split into Information Technology Systems (ITS) and Information Processing Technology (IPT).
• ITS includes multimedia, web design and development, with a light focus on coding
• Grade 9
• introduce HTML and CSS
• use Dreamweaver but not drag and drop feature
• code single page with nav, insert pictures, links and concepts of HTML layout
• Grade 10
• build on knowledge, more HTML and CSS
• code multi-page site
• IPT includes AI, software development, databases and focuses on coding
• Used to do visual basic 9-12, now javascript in junior, objective c in senior 
• W3C is used like a textbook from grade 9
• HTML5 specifically is taught including what the '5' means, how it relates to W3C and web standards
• Students are made aware of HTML validators but are not required to use them in assessment as Dreamweaver does a lot of that for them.

What does this mean for the target audience for our project?

Web historians is for people:

• who are familiar with HTML and CSS but still beginners
• might know what validation is but don't necessarily understand it's importance or how/when it can be used
• would suit grade 10 at school but other beginners in the general public and university
• would suit classroom use or as extension work for school students

(Originally posted on our team blog: Restoring the web)