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Classroom experiences, smarter tools for teachers, and professional learning on demand
September is a great time to explore some of the latest resources and ideas from DTI. Our three recent releases span Mathematics, Cybersecurity, AI and Robotics, offering new ways for students to explore, experiment and learn by doing.
That same philosophy extends beyond the screen. With B4 Spark, students can get hands-on with the inner workings of a computer, while our Curriculum Search Engine and Digital Transformation Tool help teachers and schools turn ideas and insights into action. Together with our on-demand professional learning resources, there’s plenty to explore in this edition.
🔔 In This Issue
📈 CurveLab – Explore functions, derivatives and curve sketching
⚔️ Cyber Command – Red Team vs Blue Team cybersecurity
🤖 Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics – Meet Scout the Robot
📊 Digital Transformation Tool – From insight to action
🔍 Curriculum Search Engine – Start with an idea, find where it fits
🎓 Professional Learning – Learn when it suits you
🧰 Computing You Can Touch
📈 CurveLab
CurveLab is our new free mathematics environment for exploring functions, graphs and derivatives.
Students can investigate intercepts, turning points, minima, maxima, concavity and points of inflection, while comparing the graph of f(x) with its derivatives. A built-in derivative checker also lets students test their own calculations and receive immediate feedback.
It works particularly well as a companion to classroom teaching: predict and calculate first, then use CurveLab to investigate and check.
⚔️ Cyber Command
What happens after students have learned the basics of Python?
Cyber Command provides one answer.
Two students enter the Battle Arena as Red Team and Blue Team, applying Python skills to password attacks, phishing and cyber defence before moving into a strategic incident-response battle.
Rather than completing another sequence of individual coding exercises, students must code, compete, react and make decisions under pressure.
🤖 Meet Scout: AI and Robotics
Our completely refurbished Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics course gives younger students a very tangible introduction to artificial intelligence.
Students meet Scout, a virtual robot, observe how its colour sensor provides input to its AI, and see how the resulting decisions control its motors. When Scout’s driving AI breaks down, students gradually rebuild it themselves.
The course combines robotics, AI, systems thinking and problem solving in an engaging mission story—and is now available in English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese.
📊 How Digitally Capable Is Your School?
The Digital Transformation Tool (DTT) takes a whole of school approach: rather than focusing on individual lessons, it helps schools understand and strengthen their overall digital capabilities.
Schools can assess areas including leadership, learning, managing and teaching, explore their results, identify priorities and quick wins, and use the integrated AI Advisor to turn those insights into concrete actions.
It’s deliberately more than a static survey and report. The aim is to help answer the question that comes afterwards: “What should we do next?”
🔍 Start With Your Teaching Idea
Teachers don’t usually start planning with a curriculum code. They start with an idea. Perhaps you want students to analyse patterns in weather data, investigate sustainability, build a robot—or explore cybersecurity.
Enter that idea into our Curriculum Search Engine, and it searches the Australian Curriculum V9 for relevant connections across learning areas, capabilities and priorities. Its meaning-aware search means you can describe what you want to teach naturally rather than trying to guess the terminology used by the curriculum.
The integrated AI Advisor can then help turn those curriculum connections into lesson ideas.
🧐 Teacher Professional Development
Do AI-related PD at times that suit you best:
The DTI Classroom offers an interactive, self-paced AI workshop. It includes everything teachers need to get started with AI teaching. 👉 Check it out
You can subscribe to our AI video channel to watch AI webinars at your convenience. 👉 Check it out and scroll to the bottom of the page.
🧰 Computing You Can Touch
With so much of Digital Technologies now happening on a screen, B4 Spark offers something refreshingly different: students can explore how a computer actually works by building and programming one themselves.
Through hands-on activities, students investigate binary, memory, instructions, algorithms and the fundamental operation of a computer processor. Rather than treating the computer as a black box, B4 Spark makes its inner workings visible and tangible.
It’s a great way to bring physical, hands-on computing back into the classroom—and a useful complement to coding, AI and cybersecurity activities on MyComputerBrain.
Explore at 👉 Spark Home.
We remain committed to supporting you with practical tools, inspiring PD, and curriculum-aligned resources. Whether you’re exploring AI, upskilling in Digital Systems, or searching for the perfect content, we’re here for you.
Warm Regards,
Dr. Karsten Schulz
Three major new releases, fresh teacher PD, and new ideas for the classroom.
Over the past few months we’ve been busy expanding MyComputerBrain with three major releases. Today, we're excited to bring you CurveLab, a groundbreaking interactive mathematics function analysis tool, Cyber Command, our first cybersecurity in-classroom battle arena tournament, and a completely refurbished AI and robotics course.
These additions continue our goal of providing engaging, curriculum-aligned, deep learning experiences that help students understand how technology works and how it can enrich their lives.
🔔 In This Issue
📈 CurveLab
⚔️ Cyber Command
🤖 Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics
🧐 Teacher Professional Development
⚡ Less screen time: Digital Systems hands-on
📈 CurveLab
We’re excited to introduce CurveLab, a free mathematics tool designed to help students explore functions and develop confidence with curve sketching and analytics.
Students can graph functions, analyse derivatives, identify turning points and intercepts, and compare their own derivative calculations against the correct solution—all within a single interactive learning environment. CurveLab is ideal for classroom demonstrations, revision, and independent practice.
⚔️ Cyber Command
Our fist Battle Arena activity, Cyber Command, transforms Python programming into an exciting head-to-head cybersecurity tournament.
Working in Red and Blue Teams, students apply their Python skills to solve coding challenges before competing in strategic cyber defence scenarios involving password security, phishing attacks and incident response. The result is a highly engaging classroom activity that encourages teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving under time-pressure.
🤖 Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics
Our Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics course has undergone a major refurbishment. At the heart of the new experience is Scout, a robot explorer whose adventures introduce students to sensors, decision-making and robotic control systems in an intuitive, visual way.
The course now features a stronger mission storyline, improved teacher guidance, clearer visual explanations of AI, rank promotions, and support for English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese, making it even more engaging and accessible for classrooms.
🧐 Teacher Professional Development
Our July-August PD schedule is now live! Join us for engaging, curriculum-linked sessions on AI, Python and MyComputerBrain
Duration:
Between 60 and 90 minutes.
Teachers receive:
A PD certificate (requires participation in the webinar)
Access to the recording + slides within 24 hours
Free perpetual access to the Classroom AI course (valued at $30) for AI webinar attendees.
Date | Topic |
July 30 | MyComputerBrain: What's New (free) |
August 12 | Python Primer Express |
August 13 | Getting started with MyComputerBrain (free) |
August 18 | Artificial Intelligence Primer Express |
August 19 | Coding with Artificial Intelligence |
📅 Register early to secure your spot!
If you prefer to do AI-related PD at times that suit you best:
The DTI Classroom offers an interactive, self-paced AI workshop. It includes everything teachers need to get started with AI teaching. 👉 Check it out
You can subscribe to our AI video channel to watch AI webinars at your convenience. 👉 Check it out and scroll to the bottom of the page.
⚡ Digital Systems hands-on
If you are looking for an interactive hardware solution that teaches students the inner workings of Digital System and do not require screen time: We have replenished our B4 Spark stock! These hands-on kits are ideal for late primary and early secondary students to explore logic, memory, programming, and the inner workings of a Computer.
Explore at 👉 Spark Home.
We remain committed to supporting you with practical tools, inspiring PD, and curriculum-aligned resources. Whether you’re exploring AI, upskilling in Python, or searching for the perfect content, we’re here for you.
Warm Regards,
Dr. Karsten Schulz
Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics has been refurbished on MyComputerBrain.
This update does not just refresh the look of the course. It reshapes the learning experience so that artificial intelligence is introduced through a clearer story, a more coherent mission sequence, and a much stronger visual model of how an AI system controls a robot.
The refurbished course is also now available in five languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese.
At the centre of the course is Scout, a small virtual robot explorer with a colour sensor, an AI driving system, and motors. Students first watch Scout drive, then guide Scout through early challenges, and finally step in when Scout’s driving AI breaks down. From that point on, the class becomes Scout’s repair team.
The result is an engaging introduction to AI for younger learners. Instead of meeting artificial intelligence as an abstract term, students see a concrete system: input from a sensor, processing inside an AI, and output through motor behaviour.
Why this refurbishment matters
AI can be difficult to teach well in the middle years.
If it is introduced too abstractly, students can repeat vocabulary without understanding the system underneath. If it is reduced to a black-box demo, they may see behaviour without seeing the mechanism.
The Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics course addresses that directly.
It keeps the model visible at all times:
the robot sees colour through its sensor
the AI maps that input to a decision
the motors produce movement
the track and mission outcome provide immediate feedback
That makes AI discussable. Students can predict what the robot will do, test their prediction, and revise their reasoning while the system is still in front of them.
A stronger story for the whole course
The updated course now follows a clearer mission arc.
Students begin in the lab, meet Scout, and watch a working AI system in action. In the next mission, they guide Scout through a flag-collection challenge by changing the colour clues under the robot’s sensor.
Then the disruption hits: Scout’s AI forgets how to drive.
This creates a natural reason for the next sequence of missions. Students rebuild Scout’s driving intelligence step by step. They teach the robot what to do on red, blue, and green, combine these rules into a working driving system, and then apply that repaired AI in more advanced adventures including mirrored worlds and random mazes.
The storyline stays simple, but it gives the technical sequence a clear purpose. Students are not just clicking through isolated tasks. They are helping a robot recover, learn, and take on harder missions.
What has changed
The course combines pedagogical, visual, and structural improvements.
A clearer mission narrative
The course now has a stronger through-line built around Scout, early success, AI memory loss, repair, and later adventure missions.
More age-appropriate instructional text
Mission text has been rewritten to better suit students in the 10-12 age range while keeping the technical model intact.
Full five-language availability
The course is now available in English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese, making it more practical for multilingual classrooms and wider international use.
A redesigned robot control centre
Students can now see more clearly how the AI, sensor input, and motor output relate to the robot’s movement.
Stronger visual feedback
The interface makes it easier to see whether Scout is turning left, turning right, or driving straight, and how those outcomes follow from the AI’s current rules.
A capture the flag activity Visual wheel-spin feedback
The robot now shows wheel movement directly, making it easier for students to see the effect the AI is having on Scout’s motors and motion.
A visible wireless broadcast system
The course now shows a wireless transmission from the AI system to the robot, giving students a more concrete picture of digital communication inside a working system.
A more coherent shared course design
The course overview, mission visuals, background styling, and mission images now feel like one connected robotics environment rather than a loose collection of screens.
A dedicated teacher overview page
Educators now have a clearer entry point into the course structure, mission sequence, teaching rationale, and classroom use of the platform.
Rank promotions across the course
Students can now unlock rank promotions as they progress, giving the mission sequence a stronger sense of achievement and forward momentum.
Congrats, you have been promoted !!!
What students actually do
Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics is designed to move from observation to explanation to intervention.
Students:
observe a functioning AI-controlled robot
guide Scout using colour clues
predict what a given sensor input should make the robot do
rebuild AI driving rules one rule at a time
combine rules into a working control system
apply that system to increasingly difficult route challenges
This sequence matters. Students do not start by being told a formal definition of AI. They start by seeing a system behave, then gradually take control of that system themselves.
Designed for Years 5-6
One of the strengths of Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics is that it simplifies the interface without hiding the underlying logic.
Students are not asked to believe that Scout is “thinking like a person”. Instead, they learn a more useful and more accurate idea: Scout is a system that responds to data.
That opens the door to several important computing ideas:
sensors and input data
rules and decision systems
output and actuator behaviour
testing and debugging
local decisions creating global path behaviour
For teachers, that makes the course useful well beyond a novelty robotics activity. It becomes a practical introduction to AI, systems thinking, and computational reasoning.
Suited to classroom use
The refurbished version is also more usable in lessons.
The mission sequence is clearer. The controls are easier to read. The visuals do more explanatory work. The story creates a natural reason for students to care about what comes next.
The five-language rollout also matters here. A course that explains AI through a visible robot system is especially useful when schools need accessible material across different language contexts without changing the underlying lesson structure.
The new wheel-spin feedback and wireless broadcast visualisation also strengthen the explanatory value of the course. Students can now see both the movement effect at the robot and the transmission effect from the AI, which makes the invisible parts of the system easier to discuss.
This helps in several ways:
students can follow the mission arc more easily
teachers can ask sharper prediction questions
discussions about input, output, and AI behaviour become more concrete
the later missions feel like a continuation of a journey rather than a reset into unrelated puzzles
The teacher overview page matters here as well. It gives educators a structured explanation of the course arc, the key computing ideas, likely misconceptions, and the role each mission plays in the broader sequence. That reduces setup time and makes it easier to teach the course deliberately rather than treating it as a standalone robot activity.
A stronger AI pathway on MyComputerBrain
Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics now occupies a clearer place on the platform.
It is a visual, accessible AI course for younger students that introduces core ideas through robotics. It gives teachers a compelling entry point into AI and gives students a robot they can observe, repair, and guide through progressively harder missions.
Scout’s world is now more polished, more coherent, and more teachable.
Capture the Flag with AI and Robotics is part of the growing AI pathway on MyComputerBrain.
