One minute, one current technology story, and the three questions you already know: what is being claimed, what is actually known, and who benefits if you believe it. This year a fourth joins them, because you now know enough to ask it — who has to maintain this, and for how long? Almost nothing in technology news is priced with that included, and it is where most of the real cost lives.
How to run it
- One student brings the story: the headline and two sentences of summary, no more. The job rotates, so everyone takes a turn.
- The room answers the four questions in order. Keep claimed and known strictly apart — that boundary is the whole skill.
- Park anything worth a longer argument on the board. These headlines are where Should It Exist and When Code Hurts get their material.
A worked round
A story reports that an organisation has automated a decision that people used to make by hand — screening applications, flagging accounts, routing requests. The pattern repeats every few weeks with the nouns swapped. Sorting it takes about ninety seconds:
| Question | What a careful reader writes down |
|---|---|
| Claimed | It is faster, cheaper, and “removes human bias” |
| Known | It is faster. The rest is the vendor’s wording, repeated |
| Who benefits | Whoever sold it, and whoever no longer has to justify a decision in person |
| Who maintains it | Unstated — and when the rules change, somebody has to find the code and edit it |
The last two rows are the ones that reward Grade 12. A decision that used to be made by a person could be appealed to that person. A decision made by a program can only be appealed to whoever still understands the program, which is the question Who Maintains This spends a whole period on.
One variation
Same story, two sources: read an organisation’s own announcement beside a news report about it, and list what each one leaves out. Do it again a month later, when the follow-up coverage arrives. The gap between the launch story and the follow-up is the most honest material this warm-up produces.
"We do not know yet" is a finding
The strongest sentence said in this warm-up is often that the honest answer is not known — the evidence is thin, the study was small, the demo was staged, the benchmark was chosen by the people being benchmarked. Practise saying it plainly. It is the same standard Ethics, Security, and the Profession holds every claim to, including the ones your own team will be tempted to make about your project at the handover.
Curriculum connection
D3.1
explain the impact of a variety of emerging technologies on various members of society and on societies and cultures around the world and on the economy;
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D3.2
investigate an emerging technology and produce a report using an appropriate format (e.g., technical report, website, presentation software, video).
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D4.1
report on some areas of collaborative research between computer science and other fields (e.g., bioinformatics, geology, economics, linguistics, health informatics, climatology, sociology, art), on the basis of information found in industry publications (e.g., from the ACM and IEEE);
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