1985 School Magazine

CO)'fTUTlNG ~ When the Computing Report was written at this time last year, we had one room in the Humanities block with 8 terminals, which printed in upper case only and had a very primitive editing ability, attached to the PDP 11/23 and another room in the East wing with 8 Tandy TRS 80's with two printers. During this year the Computer Club has been running informally on a Monday afternoon. It has mainly involved girls coming along to work with some of the utility programmes, such as CALIGRAPHER and MUSICA with recent interest being shown in programming and the use of the colour printer.

Now we have the 11/23 upgraded to an 11/73 serving 24 student terminals that have upper and lower case and a fairly sophisticated editing facility, with their own in-room printer and there are now 18 Tandy TRS 80's with five printers. Thinking back to the not very distant past, one wonders how Mrs Lawrence managed to teach the Electronic Data Processing segment of the Accounting course using three terminals!! Of course those were the days when there was a queue of girls anxiously await ing their turn at a terminal before school, at lunch, after school and often during " spares". Now we only have the rush close to "assignment due" time.

The major idea behind the club is to provide a situation in which girls can learn about whatever aspect of computing takes their interest and to trial any ideas they may have. Three groups of the girls are about to take part in the D.D.I.A.E. Computer Competit ion. In this, a group of three students work together with a computer and printer to pro- duce programmes to solve or answer various questions. With the Junior group having gained a Credit in last year's competition, we are hoping for a good showing again this year.

Two periods per week have been allocated this year in Year 8 to Computer Literacy. One lesson per week is held on the Tandy TRS 80 microcomputers and the other is held on the PDP-11 , the school's mini-computer. The students have been introduced to both BASIC and LOGO programming and they are currently enjoying WORD PROCESSING . Some classes are constructing an assignment on bushrangers on the WORD PROCESSOR, having utilized the Library's Apple lie computer to access a database of that name. All students will be using the WORD PROCESSOR on an assignment in English. It is hoped to continue this course into Years 9 and 10, with more WORD PROCESSING and BASIC programming. Ut ili ties such as a GRAPHICS PACKAGE and a SPREADSHEET will also be introduced to the students. 35

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