Computing Acheivement Standards - the rationale continues

I have been looking at what other schools are doing for Programming Assessments and have gathered a variety of information, most of them however are doing Unit Standards, this is one thing that we are trying to move away from at the school I am at, we are looking at Achievement Standards. However we find that they are difficult as the Technology Process is different from the commonly used System Development Life Cycle.

Here is the information that I have managed to find: located here

The Process of Creating a Computer program

The Technology Curriculum from the Ministry of Education uses a Technology process to develop programs which was designed for 'hard' technologies such as Wood, Metal, Food, and Clothing.

This process was never intended for, nor is it optimised for, creating Computer Programs. This means that NCEA assessments (Unit Standards) based on the Technology Curriculum, require students to use a different, non-standard design process to design programs.

According to Dr. Peter Andreae from the Computer Science Department at Victoria University, the design and planning process encouraged by the NZ Technology Curriculum has been shown by international research to be inefficient and inappropriate for creating computer programs. Certainly in my experience the NZQA Unit Standards do not encourage a process that easily leads to robust, well-designed programs.

It is obviously necessary to use the Ministry's process to gain Programming credits in NCEA, but for other purposes we will be using a more industry-standard method - one which is commonly used by programmers world-wide.

You can compare the two different processes here:

Technology Curriculum Programming Process
Industry-Standard Programming Process