Tony and Anne have two children. Janet and Hamish are 9 and 7, respectively. They lead very busy lives. Both parents work full time and the children are cared for by their grandparents after school. The family spend little time together and would like to find activities that they can all participate in as a family. Tony has is blind.

After some consideration, the family decide that it would be interesting to study together as a family. Tony and Anne’s families have always lived in Nottinghamshire and decide it would be fun for the children and themselves to trace the origins of the families and the area in which they have lived. The family believe that ICT will be a great help to them and they will all gain new skills from the opportunity. The family have recently bought a home computer and everyone needs to be able to use the system independently. The children are familiar with games machines and have used computers at school while their parents use computers at work but are only familiar with some applications.

The information gathered will be entered into a word processing application.

The family need to be able to use word processing, databases and the Internet to locate and record information on their family and local history. To employ the computer system and applications effectively, they need to be competent users of the interface. Janet is left handed and Tony finds reading the screen difficult as he has a significant visual impairment. The mouse can be adjusted for left handed use and the text and icons made larger so that Tony can read the onscreen text; however, he finds this close up work very tiring and stressful and so invested in some specialist software that reads the text out loud – the same software as is used in his workplace. When using images in the documents they create as part of their research, Tony’s family members are careful to include ‘alt tags’ that describe the content of the image.

Their new hobby is achieving the desired effect of enabling them to work together on a topic that is of interest to them all.

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Skills for Life; ICT Curriculum.