There can only be one

Overview

This activity has a very strong link to Civics and Citizenship, and provides opportunities for teachers to explore democracy and the voting systems used in Australia. While not strictly necessary, it is recommended that time be spent exploring this (or that the activity be delivered alongside study of the same in Social Studies subjects) to provide context for students.

The lesson sequence will take approximately 2 weeks (8 hours) depending on depth of exploration. While some parts of the sequence would be delivered in discrete lessons, the majority of time will be spent on the programming task.

This activity assumes that students have already been introduced to the Python programming language and understand the following concepts:

  • variable creation and use
  • basic Input/Output (I/O) functions (ieprint() and input() functions)
  • data structures, specifically arrays
  • branching with if statements
  • iteration / repetition using for and while loops
  • reading input from text files, in particular CSV formatted files.

Resources to assist with the teaching of these concepts in Python are provided at the end of this activity – some free, others at some cost (indicated). For students familiar with the computational thinking concepts already and who are proficient in a visual programming language, the time needed to learn Python will be greatly reduced. If students are learning Python for the first time without any prior experience with visual forms of programming, you will need to set aside a significant amount of time in class prior to completing this activity to build basic fluency. You may choose to provide code snippets to students to ease the development of their program in the latter case. Complete solutions for each activity have been provided to support teachers with this process.

Before beginning this activity, you should be aware of the Digital Technologies knowledge being explored through this activity. These provide background information that you can use to familiarise yourself with the material and to develop additional activities that could be used for students seeking to extend their learning, or who may need additional resources to support their understanding.

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