Discovery History Project

The Story of Australia
Discovery
History Project

“Discovery” is a teaching aid and student project resource for studying the history of the discovery of Australia. It is an interactive computer based program suitable for use in the middle/upper primary and lower secondary school.

The program was inspired by and produced according to the information set out in The National Centre for History Education -Teachers’ Guide. Discovery is centred on a fifteen minute audio-visual documentary, which combines drawings, narration, music and sound effects to tell the basic stories of…

	The arrival of the first Australians, the Aboriginal People, who settled along the northern coast of the Australian continent thousands of years before the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Greece.
	The visits of the early Dutch navigators who harnessed “Roaring Forties” trade winds in an effort to reach the riches of the Spice Islands as quickly as possible, and often accidentally crashed into the rocky western coast of what they began to call New Holland.
	The voyages of Able Tasman for the Dutch East India Company and his discovery of Van Dieman's Land, New Zealand and the north coast of Australia.
	Joseph Banks and the British scientific expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, which sailed in the good ship Endeavour captained by Lieutenant James Cook.
	Lieutenant Cook and his party’s search for the mysterious South Land and their discovery of the eastern coast of New Holland on the 20th of April 1770.
	The discovery and exploration of Botany Bay, the Endeavour’s treacherous passage north along the Great Barrier Reef and the return to Europe by way of Java.
	The agrarian revolution and the deplorable living conditions then existing in the overcrowded cities of England, which would eventually lead to the European settlement of Australia.

The “Discovery” audio-visual movie gives a broad overview of the discovery of the Australian continent and places the significant events in the history of its discovery in chronological order. The movie is an excellent introduction to any studies of Australian history, and the Student Project section of the program provides a springboard to more in-depth studies and further inquiry into the discovery of Australia.

Student Project
The NCHE Teachers Guide states that a survey of the research literature on narrative-based approaches to teaching documents a growing interest in the use of 'story' as a key strategy for developing young people's historical thinking. The research indicates that learners grapple with the past in much the same way as historians, making sense of it by analysing, ordering and linking events in storied form. With this research in mind, “Discovery” was designed as a project resource that challenges students to 'do' and 'make' history in a manner that resembles the historian's craft. With this research in mind, “Discovery” was designed as a project resource that challenges students to 'do' and 'make' history in a manner that resembles the historian's craft.

The program encourages students to create their own version of the Discovery movie by replacing all, or any, of the 109 drawings in the original movie with images of their choosing. The replacement of the original drawings is a very easy process that requires students to simply prepare any images that they wish to import into the movie in jpeg format and then load them into the images folder that is provided in the program.

The names of the images will appear in the Image List in the import menu of the program and, when an image is selected a thumbnail of the image appears in the viewer window and when the import button is clicked, the program will import the image and automatically resize it to fit.

Discovery can be used by individual students, by students working together in groups, or by the entire class wording on one project, i.e. with each student being allocated a section of the movie to find images for. The process of producing the movie fosters debate among the participating students and enables them to exchange ideas, refine points of view, make and justify choices, and appreciate the ideas of others.

The process of selecting and inserting the images into the program introduces learners to the use of historical methods and procedures, focusing on interpretation and the use of narrative to construct accounts of the past, involving them as participants rather than spectators in the study of Australian history.

Students can obtain the images from a number of sources, such as the project resources of the school library and the internet, or they can create their own drawings or paintings and insert them into the movie, depicting their personal interpretation of the discovery of Australia.

The search for and selection of the images helps in developing student’s research skills and helps them learn how to reason historically with content and to understand that historical accounts and illustrations of the past may differ or conflict because people select and use evidence in different ways for different purposes.

Being in the role of movie-maker particularly strengthens their understanding of how movies can select, exclude, control, manipulate and tamper with historical realities.

Each image of the movie has an accompanying “NOTES" page, which assists learners to develop patterns of historical reasoning by encouraging them to ask questions, foster debate, use evidence to support a position and, understanding that historical and literary dimensions of students' learning are complementary, to communicating that position effectively.

The Notes page encourages students to analyse and make judgments regarding the plausibility of the script for that section of the movie and to analyse and make judgments regarding how well the images depict what is stated in the script and to give the reasons for their assessments in writing,

The program also contains an assessment page where teachers can communicate with the students during their production of the movie and provide an assessment of their work on completion of the project.

The production of the movie gives students a feeling of accomplishment and builds a sense of pride in their achievement and, with the school’s purchase of an unlimited site licence, students can copy the program to their personal computer and work on it from there. Then, on completion of the program, students can burn a copy to CD-ROM for a permanent record of their achievement. Because the program remains active, students can consider it a work in progress and continue to update it if new and more suitable images come to hand.

Discovery has a comprehensive teachers' guide, program tutorials, student review sheets, further learning activities and an interactive review to reinforce student comprehension.

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