HSC 2025: New Software Engineering, Enterprise Computing courses swap fax machines for machine learning

The IT girls and guys of the Class of ’25 will finally be able to hack their HSC studies as authorities put the byte on outdated courses that still refer to floppy disks and Y2K.

The IT girls and guys of the Class of ’25 will finally be able to hack their HSC studies in an education department drive to put the byte on outdated courses that still refer to ’80s floppy disks and Y2K.

The final cohort of Year 12 students to study the Software Design and Development (SDD) and Information Processes and Technology (IPT) computing courses – the newest of which is 14 years old – finished their HSC exams this week.

The IPT syllabus included dot points on “storage media, including hard discs, CD-ROMs, cartridge and tape”, while SDD set students to study about “inappropriate data structures, for example the year 2000 problem”.

Oran Park High School Year 12 IPT student Samiksha Thapar will pursue a computer science degree, specialising in cybersecurity, and said her HSC course “definitely” needed to be updated.

“A lot of the parts of the syllabus were outdated, like for example magnetic tapes – yes they’re still used today but not as often – and floppy disks aren’t used anymore,” she said.

Oran Park High School computing students (L-R): Marwa Aamir, Samiksha Thapar (Year 12), their teacher Bojan Djoneski, Salvatore Tumminia and Joshua Mezzano-Lindner (Year 11). Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Education expert Dr Kevin Donnelly, who co-chaired a review of the national curriculum in 2014, was shocked to learn NSW HSC students were still being taught about fax and floppy disks in senior elective courses.

“Whatever’s taught must be able to keep up with the times, otherwise students learning about obsolete technology are wasting their time,” he said.

The floppy disk – a format so old, many teenagers wouldn’t recognise it.

“It’s not going to help them in the real world.”

Australian Computer Society ICT Educators Committee chair Sharon Singh said technology syllabuses need to be designed with “flexibility” built in to keep up with the rapid changes in the sector.

“There is a place for (historical technology) in the curriculum, however it should not be a huge focus in a software course,” she said.

Next year two new replacement subjects – Software Engineering and Enterprise Computing – will be put to the test, with the Class of 2025 acting as guinea pigs for the new specialisations.

The new courses include cybersecurity, machine learning, artificial intelligence, coding across different languages and programming mechatronics Picture: Alain Jocard / AFP

The new courses include specifics around cybersecurity, machine learning, artificial intelligence, coding across different languages and programming mechatronics.

Oran Park High School IT teacher Bojan Djoneski has already experienced “teething issues” with the courses, left to teach them with none of the usual resources like textbooks to refer to, but said the new subjects were “long overdue”.

Mr Djoneski, a former software engineer, said the “small refresh” in 2009 makes IPT “essentially a 22-year-old course” – one that was not preparing students for work in the modern IT industry.

“For that reason, especially here in the Macarthur region, we’re one of the very few schools to offer it – students elected not to do it anymore, because it was so outdated and there was no new syllabus in sight,” he said.

IT teacher and former software engineer Mr Djoneski said the syllabus update is long overdue. (L to R) Salvatore Tumminia, Hani Atieh, Bojan Djoneski, Marwa Aamir and Samiksha Thapar. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Both IPT and SDD recorded their lowest enrolments as a proportion of the HSC candidature this year, and while enrolments in SDD have stayed around the 2.5 per cent mark over the past ten years, interest in IPT has waned from 4.13 per cent of HSC students to 2.46 per cent.

School leavers had been calling for “a complete overhaul” of the two computing subjects on online message boards as far back as 2012.

At Oran Park HS the popularity of computing has already rebounded with the introduction of the replacement subjects, the school doubling its number of Software Engineering students in just one year.

Year 11 student Joshua Mezzano-Lindner said the replacement course would set him up well for his future in a world “being transformed by technology”.

“The fifth and sixth most in-demand careers of the future (are) data analysis and cybersecurity, and those are two significant topics that we study in enterprise computing,” he said.

Classmate Hani Atieh studies both enterprise computer and software engineering, and said the comparison between the new courses and the old IPT subject his sister before him studied is stark.

“Half the stuff they do is not really relevant to today’s world because it’s outdated,” he said.

“But I’ve noticed everything I’m doing directly relates to what software engineers actually do … like software delivery methodologies.”