Year 7 Smart Cells Criterion A: Inquiring and Analyzing

Smart Cells

Key Concepts

Relationships are the connections and associations between properties, objects, people and ideas-including the human community's connections with the world in which we live. Any change in relationship brings consequences-some of which may occur on a small scale, while others may be far reaching, affecting large networks and systems like human societies and the planetary ecosystem.

Related Concepts

Collaboration, Function, Markets and trends

Conceptual Understanding
Innovations in budgeting is a function of the relationships arising from the input variables.

Global Context and Explorations
Scientific and technical innovation
Explorations to develop

• Mathematical puzzles
• Principles and discoveries
• Processes and solutions

Inquiry Questions

• Which formulas are appropriate in calculations for different situations?
• How do you determine the best formulas to be used while calculating?
• Does the use budgeting software solutions kill human calculation creativity?

Budgeting

Our focus of the unit will be on budgeting. You will identify a client with a specific problem of budgeting such as a client who needs help with the coming up of a wedding budget, trip budget, household budget, spending budget and others. You will assist your client to solve this particular problem by proposing a solution to his problem and creating a budget for him (to solve this particular problem) at the end of the unit using one of the budgeting software such as Excel, Mint and other software that you can learn how to use it on the internet.

We will cover the four Criterion of Digital Design;

• Criterion A: Inquiring and Analyzing
• Criterion B: Developing Ideas
• Criterion C: Creating the Solution
• Criterion D: Evaluating

Criterion A: Inquiring and Analyzing

We will be focusing on the following strands for Criterion A:

• Strand 1: Identify a client with a problem and justify 
• Strand 2: Construct a research plan
• Strand 3: Analyze a range of existing products that inspire a solution to the problem
• Strand 4: Develop a detailed design brief which summarizes the analysis of relevant research.

Strand 1: Identify a Client with a Problem and Justify  

• Your task is to identify a client with a budgeting problem. The client can be your uncle, your friend, your parent or an organization who needs an assistance in creating a budget such as for a trip, for wedding, monthly household consumption, organization monthly budget, travel budget and others.
• You also need to give a justification (reason why) you want to assist your client to solve this particular problem. Some of the reasons can be stress due to inability to come up with the budget, deadlines for the activity (such as wedding,trip) which requires one to  have a budget fast approaching.
• Your strand 1 should contain a detailed description of your client i.e who he is, where he comes from , what he does , the problem he is facing and the justification( the reason why you want to assist him to solve this problem)
• Your strand 1 should be a minimum of half a page and a maximum of 1 page.

• Client examples:- your friend, an organization, your parent/dorm parent
• Problem example :-- Budgeting ( wedding, travel, trip, household, shopping)
• Justification example:- the person has been facing challenge/ stress making a budget

Below is an example of how Strand 1 work should appear like:

Example of Strand 1

My client Mr Lang’at is planning to organize a wedding this year December 2018. He has been facing a big challenge trying to come up with budget for his wedding and he is stressed up as he does not know how to easily make up his budget. My client needs help with the issue of budgeting because his wedding is drawing closer and he wants to ensure that everything necessary for the wedding is well gathered for and budgeted as per the resources available.

Strand 2: Research Plan

• Come up with a research plan for your budgeting problem. 
• You MUST have a minimum of 8 Priorities/8 Research questions.
• Research questions MUST be related to the budgeting problem that you want to solve or address; research questions are questions that assists you to understand the budgeting problem that your client is facing.
• The date of completion shows the date in which you will complete doing your research (getting the answers) for the research questions that you have formulated.
• You should be able to identify your sources of information (where you get the information about your budgeting problem); whether primary or secondary. Primary sources are firsthand source of information you obtain from your client such as interview, questionnaire, observation and others while secondary source of information are sources such as internet, textbook and others. 
• You must also give the reason why a particular research question is important. You should explain how the research question assists you to solve your client's budgeting problem.
• Your research plan should look like the one displayed in the next slide below( Not similar in terms of research questions, but in terms of the requirements/ the way the table is organized).

Example of a Research Plan

Strand 3: Analyze a Range of Existing Products that Inspire a Solution to the Problem.

In this section you are supposed to:

• Analyze three different free online software that are used for budgeting and list down their advantages and disadvantages. You analyze software that are use to make budgets such as Excel, Mint, Expensify and others. You must list down at least 2 advantages and disadvantages.
• State/choose one software from the three software above which you analyzed, that you are going to use  to create your own budget and justify (state at least 3 reasons why you chose it). You must give an explanation why choose the said software, lets say Excel to use to make your budget over other software such as Mint and Expensify. You should state the reasons you chose in writing in a prose form.
• Analyze at least any 2 budgets that have been made; online , within the school  or outside the school and list down at least 3 information technology IT Skills you can borrow. You must look for budgets that have been made online or at school and home and mention the IT Skills that you can borrow from it. IT skills include features such as the use of good font size, font color, use of different color for different items, use of different categories to organize the budget such as the income and expense section, incorporation of bar graphs and pie charts, use of proper spacing to make the work organized and others.
• An example of analysis of budgets that have been made online can be like this.

IS Hardware Budget

This is a budget that was made by the school for the purchase of the school computers. The picture of the budget is shown below.

Information Technology Skills I can Borrow

The IT skills that i can borrow from this budget is the use of different categories for it items such as Desktop hardware, Misc hardware and Backup. Another skill that i liked in this budget is also the specifications of quantity of items purchased for each item which makes it easy to calculate the total costs. Another IT skill that i also liked in this budget is the the use of Bold and larger font size for its titles of different categories.

Strand 4: Develop a detailed design brief which summarizes the analysis of relevant research

• Summarize strand 1:- mention who your client is, the budgeting problem he is facing and effects of the problem (which is about budgeting ) in a paragraph.
• Summarize strand 2:- Summarize the information that you found out from your research. Mention relevant areas from your research plan. Mention the information that you found out after conducting your research such as by interviewing your client and researching on the internet or textbooks; that is in both primary and secondary sources of research. 
• Summarize strand 3:- mention the three software used to create budget that that you researched on and the chosen one (the software you chose to use to create a budget) and give a justification/reasons why you chose that particular software over the others.
• Write the entire summary of strand 1, 2 and 3 in prose form and it should be at least a half a page.
• Bibliography:- put bibliography at the end. You should put bibliography in its own page.

Example of Summary of Strand 1

Mr Lang’at is a teacher who lives in Bomet Kenya. He has been trying to come up with a budget for his wedding which is due on December 2019. Lang’at has been quite stressed of late because the tool he has been trying to use to come up with his budget is quite ineffective and time consuming. As a result making of the budget for his wedding has come to halt abruptly. 

Example of Summary of Strand 2

After conducting a research with my client I noticed that the current manual system he normally uses to make his budgeting is ineffective and time consuming and leads to a lot of duplications which result to poor budget. As a result my client has always have challenges making his budget for other things such as household goods. I also realized that his wedding would be attended by many people and would require a lot of items to budget for and hence would require an efficient budgeting software to do so.

Example of Summary of Strand 3

There were different budget making software I researched on such as Excel, Access and…I liked working with Excel because I found it efficient and effective  and it easier to print it and share it with other sources. I will be using this particular software to assist my client Mr Lang’at to come up with his wedding budget.