Boneo Primary School · SPARK Centre · 24 June 2026
Year 6 students step into others shoes on the social media ban
What does a parent actually feel about Australia's new social media law? Or a content creator whose young audience has just been legislated away? Or a mental health professional who has watched teenagers scroll themselves into anxiety for years? These were not hypothetical questions at Boneo Primary School on Wednesday morning.
They were the starting points for a rich thinking session that saw Year 6 students wrestle with one of the most contested policy decisions in recent Australian history, and do it from someone else's point of view.
A routine with real depth
The session was a Circle of Viewpoints (COV), a structured thinking routine developed by Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Unlike a traditional debate, COV does not ask students to argue a side. Instead, it asks them to inhabit a perspective: to think, question, and reason as if they were a parent, a politician, a teacher, a social media company, a mental health professional, or a content creator.
Facilitating the session were educational technologist Kieran Nolan and digital technologies teacher Katie Gunn. The topic was Australia's law banning social media access for young people under 16, which took effect in December 2025 and gave students plenty to think about.
"The beauty of this routine is that it disrupts the instinct to immediately form an opinion. Students who might have come in with a fixed view found themselves having to genuinely defend a position they had never considered before." Kieran Nolan, Educational Technologist, Boneo Primary School SPARK Centre
The data tells its own story
More than half of the students chose the Parent viewpoint. The next largest group, at 28.6%, chose Content Creator / Influencer. The remainder spread across Mental Health Professional, Politician, Teacher, and Social Media Company. The distribution itself became a talking point: why did so many students gravitate toward the Parent perspective? Perhaps because parents are the most visible stakeholder in this debate, the ones making daily decisions about screen time at home.
What students actually said
The responses were striking in their range and, in many cases, their sophistication.
Students adopting the Parent viewpoint were broadly supportive of the ban, though not uniformly so. Many cited screen addiction, inappropriate content, and the loss of outdoor activity as motivators. One student noted a genuine shift in thinking: "At first I thought it wasn't the best idea, but after writing this I believe it's a good idea." Several raised practical enforcement concerns: What happens when a determined teenager simply uses a parent's face ID? Is age verification robust enough?
Content Creator responses pushed back firmly. Students in this role identified the economic consequences of losing a young audience, but several went further than simple opposition. One articulated a nuanced alternative:
"What if you made it more protective instead of making it 16+, so everyone can have fun too? Even lowering the age would be better than 16+. Maybe try to focus more on what people want as well as what they need. Include safety updates, but include both 50/50." Year 6 student, Content Creator viewpoint
The single student who adopted the Politician viewpoint produced perhaps the most considered response of the session, declining to simply agree or disagree and instead proposing a targeted alternative: restrict commenting on short-form content across platforms, rather than blocking access entirely. They also identified the ban's central weakness as their key question: what if kids find ways to get around the age verification?
Mental Health Professional respondents were largely in favour, with several noting that incessant short-form content scrolling had long been a concern. "It is good that it has finally happened," one wrote, "because kids were just scrolling for hours."
A Harvard connection
The session is part of a broader research-connected project at Boneo Primary School. Through experience, education consultant Karin Morrison understands and appreciates the impact and learning opportunities that the research and practice of Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education provide. She has visited the school and worked alongside the SPARK Centre team to trial thinking routines with students across year levels.
Earlier in the year, the team ran a session with Karin Morrison for the Year 2 students on Artificial Intelligence, and the COV session on the social media ban was a natural next step with the older cohort. Both sessions generated substantial documented responses that will be shared with Project Zero as case study material. The full session report is available here.
The session also incorporated a digital data capture component, with students submitting responses via Google Forms. The real-time pie chart showing viewpoint distribution became a discussion point in itself: a live map of where the class stood before any discussion had even begun.
The SPARK Centre and visible thinking
Boneo Primary School is a government primary school in the heart of the Mornington Peninsula, with around 350 students drawn from the local catchment of Boneo, Fingal, St Andrews Beach and Cape Schanck. Built around the values of respect, empathy and determination, it is a community school with a focus on educating the whole child. The Year 6 students in this session come from that largely coastal, semi-rural community, and work within a school culture that encourages reflection, goal-setting and respectful dialogue, the kind of culture a routine like Circle of Viewpoints depends on.
The SPARK Centre at Boneo Primary School has built a reputation for connecting hands-on technology education with deeper learning frameworks. Students have previously engaged with robotics and prosthetics design, VR environments, 3D printing, network engineering, cybersecurity, and blockchain key-pair education.
Adding Visible Thinking Routines to that mix reflects a deliberate philosophy: that genuine understanding, not just technical skill, is the goal. "We want students who can build things and think things," Nolan said. "The COV is a perfect example. The technology captured the data; the routine did the thinking work."
Did their thinking change?
Perhaps the most telling data point from the session is what happened at the end. Students were asked whether their thinking had changed after inhabiting their chosen viewpoint. Many said no, but "no" rarely meant they were unchanged. Several who maintained their original position could articulate it more precisely, with more awareness of the opposing view, than they had been at the start. A handful reported genuine shifts.
That ambiguity, neither a neat conversion nor a stubborn entrenchment, is exactly what the routine is designed to produce. Not changed minds. Bigger ones.