Every school subject and every field of knowledge has a similar problem: What is the core knowledge that should be learned? In university courses, each student takes a different pathway through the options that are offered, and in school courses teachers and curriculum planners have to choose which ideas, content and skills should be emphasised. No student or teacher will ever have the time to comprehensively study every area of their major subjects; in fact, the longer they study a subject at university, the more they tend to increase the depth of their knowledge rather than the breadth. This chapter aims to help teachers unpack the large amount of information in the Australian Curriculum: Geography, emphasising the core knowledge and understandings. For every unit of the curriculum from Year 7 to Year 10, as well as the senior years, an interpretation of the core knowledge is presented, together with the key inquiry and skills developed within it. Following this are commentaries on examples of appropriate case studies that are suitable to achieve the aims of the unit.

Over the past decades, we have learned a great deal about what infants bring to the task of mastering space and quantity, and what they subsequently add to these starting points. The accumulating findings are richly descriptive, and they are beginning to illuminate long-standing questions concerning the origins of knowledge in these domains. Broadly speaking, there have been two contending theoretical approaches. The core knowledge view claims that infants are born with representationally specific processing modules tuned to picking up the geometry of space (the geometric module), forming representations of objects (continuity, cohesion, contact, tracking small sets), and assessing the number of objects (the approximate number system) (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007). In this way of thinking, subsequent developmental change comes mainly from augmentation of the power and scope of these innate modules, as children acquire language and other forms of symbolic processing.

Physical reasoning is the ability to go beyond the information in the immediate perceptual array. For example, if I were to dangle my keys in front of me with the intention of letting go of them, everyone would predict that the moment I let go of the keys, they will fall towards the ground. Similarly, if I hide my keys behind my back, everyone has the expectation that the keys continue to exist and that the shape and size of the keys remain the same as they were before they were hidden from view. These two examples demonstrate that people share the same basic ideas about how objects behave and interact. These expectations may be universal across all humans, and they may even be shared by some other species. However, researchers are still puzzled by some aspects of these fundamental abilities. For instance, even though most people can effortlessly draw similar predictions about these events, we have yet to build a computer that can rival the physical reasoning abilities of a typically developing 1-year-old infant. In this chapter, we argue that one way to resolve some of the mysteries about physical reasoning is to look at the origins of the abilities and how they change over time. We start by reviewing the literature on the physical reasoning abilities of human infants.