Curriculum

How to read this page

Tech Tempest is an immersive simulation, not a syllabus unit. Schools have run it as an enrichment day, a unit capstone and a careers and enterprise event.

Rather than claim alignment to one framework, we describe what students actually do across the day. You can then match that to the outcomes your own curriculum asks for, in your state, at your year level.

Australian schools now run several frameworks side by side: the Australian Curriculum Version 9, the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, NESA syllabuses in New South Wales, and a separate senior certificate in every state. Tech Tempest is built around the capabilities common to all of them.

What students actually do

Across a full day, competing in eight teams, students:

• interpret a real client brief and work out what the client actually needs
• research an unfamiliar industry and defend their conclusions to others
• choose a strategy under constraint, knowing rival teams are choosing differently
• price a bid, trading cost against risk, quality and delivery time
• design a technical solution and justify why it fits the client
• use AI tools as instruments of inquiry, and verify what those tools hand back
• plan delivery across a timeline, naming the risks and who carries them
• write and deliver a persuasive pitch to a client who asks hard questions
• respond to a live scoreboard, and to one final event nobody planned for

Everything below follows from that list. Nothing on this page claims more than the day delivers.

Where it connects

Economics and Business

Competitive advantage and how businesses build it. Cost, pricing and the trade-offs between them. Risk and reward. Deciding a course of action from evidence rather than instinct.

Digital Technologies

Turning a client brief into design criteria. Generating and critically comparing competing solution designs. Selecting and using emerging digital tools, including AI, to communicate to an audience. Managing a collaborative project and accounting for its risks.

English

Planning, rehearsing and delivering a persuasive multimodal presentation for a specific audience. Producing the written bid that sits behind it. Judging how well any text achieves the purpose it was built for.

Work Studies and Careers

Roles and responsibility inside a working team. The changing world of work. Pathways and job families most students have never heard of.

Civics, Citizenship and Ethics

The ethical questions automation raises, and who carries the consequences of a decision once it is made.

History and Humanities

Eight ancient civilisations as working models of governance, trade and innovation, used as a lens on present-day strategy rather than as historical content.

Capabilities

Whatever your framework calls them, the day exercises:

critical and creative thinking · digital literacy · ethical understanding · personal and social capability · intercultural understanding · literacy

Numeracy appears through pricing, budgets and risk calculation, though it is not a primary focus of the day.

Students work at the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy throughout: analysing a client brief, evaluating competing strategies, and creating an original bid and pitch.

Senior secondary touchpoints by state

Victoria

VCE Business Management (Units 3 and 4), Economics, Applied Computing and Data Analytics, Legal Studies, and the VCE Vocational Major, where the day serves the applied, work-related learning the VM is built around.

New South Wales

NESA senior subjects including Business Studies, Economics, and Enterprise Computing, with delivery experience at NSW Department of Education schools including Year 10 Commerce.

Queensland

QCE subjects including Business, Economics and Digital Solutions, with repeat delivery at Queensland state schools.

South Australia

SACE Business Innovation, where the subject's cycle of finding, solving and pitching a customer problem mirrors the structure of the day.

The pedagogy underneath

The day is built on identity-based learning (students act as their civilisation, not as themselves), constraint-driven decision-making, consequence-rich scoring, and AI used as a tool of inquiry with verification, not as an answer machine.

Discovery over instruction. Consequences over lectures.

Detailed curriculum mapping

Teachers who need content descriptors for unit documentation can request a current mapping for their state, framework and year level. We keep these up to date rather than publish them here, because the frameworks change and a stale code helps nobody.