Year 7 ICAS Digital Technologies 5-Question Sample

Question 1 of 5 Word processing

The half-hour first sentence: facing a 1500-word report, a student starts writing the introduction's first sentence and stalls, rewriting it for half an hour. What workflow unblocks it?

A push harder and harder on the opening sentence until it finally comes out perfect, because a proper report must be written in exactly the order it will eventually be read and the introduction therefore has to exist in fully polished form before any of the later sections can honestly be attempted by a careful writer B the block means the topic is wrong, restarting with an easier one C write without structure and let the shape emerge in editing D write the outline first: heading and subheading skeleton laid down before any prose, the whole report's shape visible and rearrangeable in minutes, with sentences then filling sections in any order, because structure decided first is what unblocks the writing and the introduction is easiest written last

Question 2 of 5 Word processing

The forty-line paragraph: a student's report is technically excellent yet returns with "hard to follow": each page is one unbroken paragraph, forty lines deep. What is the repair?

A leave the paragraphs as they stand and shrink the font instead, because the complaint is really about the pages looking long and smaller type fits the same unbroken text into a less intimidating amount of visible space on each page B the wall is the problem: readers navigate by paragraph breaks, one idea per paragraph, with white space as the resting points, so the fix is splitting at each idea shift, a few sentences per paragraph, the same words becoming followable once the structure breathes C long paragraphs signal sophistication and the marker misread the level D convert the whole report to dot points, prose being the problem

Question 3 of 5 Graphics and multimedia

The forty-piece portfolio: assembling a design portfolio for a competition, a student includes every project since Year 4, forty pieces, weak and strong side by side. What is the curation principle?

A include everything from the whole four years, because competition judges are experienced enough to skip straight past the weaker pieces on their own and a bigger portfolio demonstrates sustained productivity and visible growth in a way that a small careful selection of polished pieces never could hope to B sort the forty by date and let the improvement tell the story C cut to exactly one piece, the single best making the purest portfolio D curation beats completeness: a portfolio is judged by the impression it leaves, and weak pieces dilute strong ones, so the professional cut is ruthless, the best six to ten pieces, each earning its place, with range shown deliberately, judges remembering the standard, not the count

Question 4 of 5 Spreadsheets and databases

Four before three hundred: about to send the wellbeing survey to three hundred students, a student is talked into first giving it to four classmates, who immediately find an ambiguous question and a broken required field. What is the practice, and its logic?

A skip the pilot entirely because four responses are far too few to mean anything statistically speaking, and any time spent surveying and analysing a sample as small as that is really just time taken directly away from collecting the three hundred real responses that the project actually needs to gather B careful proofreading by the author replaces piloting C flaws found after sending can be fixed by editing the live survey mid-collection D the four-person run is a pilot: testing the survey on a handful of people before the real send catches confusing wording, broken settings and missing options while fixes cost minutes, because flaws discovered after three hundred responses have already poisoned the data

Question 5 of 5 Internet and email

Everything through chat: a group project runs everything through one sprawling chat: quick questions, the formal timeline for the teacher, and detailed feedback on the draft, all scrolling past each other. What is the communication principle?

A one channel for absolutely everything is the best practice for a group, because keeping the whole project inside a single running chat stream means that nobody on the team ever has to stop and remember which of several different places a particular message might be living in when they eventually need it back B channels have jobs: chat carries quick coordination, email carries the formal and the referenceable, and document comments carry feedback anchored to the exact text it concerns, so routing each message type to its channel keeps questions answered, records findable and feedback in place C the fix is messaging more loudly, tagging everyone on important items D face-to-face replaces digital channels for serious project work

Year 7 Digital Technologies sample

Answer the sample questions