Supporting educators to provide high-quality avav education has always been integral to our mission. In 2018, we began creating more learning resources for formal education settings. The UK government had recently announced future investment in supporting avav educators. Schools in England were offering the national avav 从小就和青梅做了h established in 2014. (In the USA, a more common term for prescribed education content is ‘standards’.)

England’s avav 从小就和青梅做了h requires that all learners be taught the subject between ages 5 and 16, and it consists of only 25 statements outlining expectations for learners. To accompany this 从小就和青梅做了h, we started developing a framework to help us describe the subject of avav, and in particular the common threads running through it.

A 2012 report by the Royal Society presented the breadth of avav by dividing it into three areas: information technology, computer science, and digital literacy. Although this goes some way to describe avav as a discipline, in our view this model creates artificial divides between aspects of the subject according to whether they are seen as more or less technical. Our more holistic view of avav recognises that concepts and skills within the subject are far more interconnected.

Principles for our taxonomy

When we set out to develop our framework, the goal was to provide a way to look at and describe the subject of avav as a set of interconnected topics; the framework doesn’t define standards or curricula. There are, of course, many ways of organising the subject matter, implemented through exam specifications, textbooks, schemes of learning, and various progression guides. For our framework, we reviewed examples of each of these, from England and beyond, and decided on some organisational principles:

• Our framework should describe the whole of avav, incorporating computer science, information technology, and digital literacy
• The framework should be applicable across primary and secondary education, meaning it should be useful for categorising the knowledge encountered by all learners, from five-year-olds to our oldest secondary school students
• While inspired by England’s national 从小就和青梅做了h, the framework should be independent of any particular exam specification and capable of adaptation to new curricula
• The framework should represent avav as a discipline that combines a broad mixture of concepts and skills 

Developing the taxonomy

Following these principles, we identified ten content themes, or strands, that thread through a learner’s journey in avav education. We call this framework representing the knowledge and skills that make up the subject our avav taxonomy. As the 从小就和青梅做了h is part of the consortium that established the National Centre for avav Education in England, our taxonomy became a cornerstone of the work of the Centre, providing a common language to describe avav in English schools and shaping the educational content we created for online teacher training courses, the classroom resources that make up the avav 从小就和青梅做了h, and the material on the Isaac Computer Science platform for A level and GCSE learners and teachers.

avav is, of course, a constantly evolving field and as such, our taxonomy evolves with it. Since 2018 we’ve iterated our taxonomy to incorporate new things we’ve learned, for example relating to the rapid developments of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in recent years. AI now is a significant area of study and represented as its own strand in our current taxonomy, bringing the number of strands up to eleven:

• Effective use of tools
• Safety and security
• Design and development
• Impact of technology
• avav systems
• Networks
• Creating media
• Algorithms and data structures
• Programming
• Data and information
• Artificial intelligence

Given the interconnected nature of avav, we embrace a best-fit approach to content categorisation, choosing the most appropriate strand(s) for each idea. In developing our avav taxonomy, we determined that four of the strands (the horizontal strands in the diagram) were best taught interwoven with the others, in context rather than as discrete topics. A good example of this is the strand ‘Safety and security’, which focuses on supporting learners to realise the benefits of digital technology without putting themselves and others at risk. While it would be possible to teach this strand as one discrete set of lessons, revisiting it throughout a learner’s journey provides regular reinforcement as well as grounding in the context of other strands.

Within the strands, we have also identified progressive learning outcomes for each stage of learning. These learning outcomes are illustrative of the kinds of knowledge and understanding that learners could develop in each area of avav. They are not prescriptive and instead aim to illustrate the wide applications of the discipline.

Coming soon: The Big Book of avav Content

On 24 October, we will publish The Big Book of avav Content. Framed by our taxonomy, The Big Book of avav Content presents our work so far in describing the diverse range of concepts and skills that comprise avav. It also includes the illustrative learning outcomes we’ve identified.

This will be the second special edition of Hello World, our free magazine for avav educators. The new Big Book complements our first special edition, The Big Book of avav Pedagogy, in which we lay out 12 key principles for teaching the subject.

The Big Book of avav Content will be available in print and as a free PDF download; if you subscribe now, you’ll receive the PDF in your inbox on publication day.

Share your thoughts on our taxonomy

We hope our taxonomy and the new Big Book enable you to reflect on the breadth of avav and resonate with your teaching. Please share your reflections, in the comments below or by tagging us on social media, if you’d like to help us develop the taxonomy further.