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hello@ferressystems.com.au
Based in
Melbourne, Victoria

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// RANGE ZERO FOR SCHOOLS

Digital Technologies your students actually do.

Range Zero is our Digital Technologies platform for secondary schools: short lessons, hands-on labs, whole-class investigations and the assessment to go with them, running in a browser on the machines a school already has.

Talk to us about it
 First See how it works
The Range Zero front page: three students and their teacher at an evidence board, under the line Digital Technologies your students actually do.
// ONE PLATFORM FOR THE WHOLE SUBJECT

Every subject in Range Zero has the same four things in it: lessons to learn from, hands-on labs, activities for the whole class, and a way to assess what students learned. Cybersecurity is ready now; the rest are being built, with the pilot schools deciding the order.

Ready now

Cybersecurity

Investigate real-shaped incidents from the evidence up, then the labs and modules that sit underneath.

In development

Programming

Write code that runs, and learn to read code that does not.

In development

Game development

Build something other people want to play.

In development

STEM and robotics

Algorithms students can watch drive across the table.

In development

Artificial intelligence

How it learns, where it goes wrong, and when not to trust it.

Available now

In-person visits

A practising cybersecurity professional runs the investigation in the school’s own room.

// BUILT FOR THE TEACHER AT THE FRONT OF THE ROOM
Plan

Plan a term in minutes

One library of investigations, labs and self-paced modules, each marked with its year level and length and mapped to Victorian Curriculum 2.0.

The Range Zero library with investigations and labs listed by length and year level, and a Term 1 plan being built alongside.
Teach

See every team at once

Every team’s board, live, on one screen. Hold evidence back until the room has a theory, nudge a team that is stuck, and see a hand go up from across the room.

The class screen showing three teams, each with a miniature of their evidence board, their score, and one team asking for the teacher.
Assess

Marking that shows its working

Connections between evidence are marked as teams make them. The written report is marked by the teacher against a five-criterion rubric written for a teacher, not an analyst.

Results for four teams showing confirmed and close connections, beside the five criteria of the incident report rubric.
// WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ROOM
Investigate

Ten pieces of real-shaped evidence

A phishing email with its headers, authentication and web server logs, a firewall log, a network diagram and a server configuration. Not a worksheet about passwords.

Connect

Join the evidence on a board

Teams pin the evidence up and say how each thing led to the next. Every connection writes a sentence of their incident report as they go.

Respond

Discover the obvious answer is wrong

Everyone says “delete the file and change the password”. Then they find the scheduled task that puts it back ten minutes later.

The start of the Northbridge Secondary Incident: the case, with a rail of five steps from the case to the report.
The lesson: five steps, from the case to the report.
An authentication log from the investigation, shown as a readable page with every line visible.
The evidence: real-shaped logs, readable in any browser.
// BUILT FOR A SCHOOL'S ACTUAL IT ENVIRONMENT

What it needs

  • A current browser: Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari
  • Outbound HTTPS on port 443 to the school’s own Range Zero address
  • Optionally, sign-in with the school’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace accounts

What it does not need

  • Any installation, on any device
  • Local administrator rights
  • Virtual machines on your hardware
  • Student accounts or directory access to run a lesson
  • Any student name, email address or date of birth in a lesson

It is designed for managed Chromebooks, SSL inspection and school wifi. Every address in the scenario is IETF-reserved and cannot route on the internet, and every domain ends in .example: nothing in the material refers to a real system.

// HOW A SCHOOL STARTS

Free for a first term

One teacher and one class for a term, with the full investigation and every lab that runs in the browser. Labs that run on virtual machines or real hardware are not part of the free term.

The whole school

Every teacher and every class, all year, with staff onboarding and support. Quoted for each school.

We come in and run it

About three hours of class time, arranged around the school’s timetable: in one day, over two, or a period at a time, for any number of students. Quoted for each school.

// QUESTIONS SCHOOLS ASK
Is this teaching students to hack?

No, and it is built so that it could not be. The flagship exercise is an investigation: students read evidence collected after an incident and work out what happened. They never attack anything, because there is nothing to attack. The one artefact that resembles attacker code is a transcript with every functional line removed, and an automated check fails the build if it ever contains one.

What does a school’s IT department have to approve?

A current browser and outbound HTTPS on port 443. Nothing is installed, and it needs no administrator rights, virtual machine or directory integration. Each school has its own Range Zero address, and staff can optionally sign in with the school’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace accounts. Web filters differ from school to school, so we offer a short preflight check with the IT team, and supply a technical requirements document and a data handling statement written for IT staff.

What student data does it hold?

In a lesson, students work as a team with a team number and a random six-character code the teacher reads out; Range Zero does not ask for a student’s name, email address, date of birth or school account, and IP addresses are not recorded. It holds operational data about the class and each team’s work, and for staff a name, school email address and role. Data is held in Australia with no third-party analytics or trackers, and a class record is deleted automatically after 90 days, or on request. Optional student accounts for self-paced work are off unless the school turns them on.

Will it work on our Chromebooks?

ChromeOS is what it is developed against, and it is designed to run on a managed Chromebook, behind SSL inspection, on school wifi. Every piece of evidence is also a plain readable web page, so if something on a network interferes with the interactive parts the lesson still runs.

Does the teacher need a security background?

No. The teacher pack has a run sheet, an answer guide and troubleshooting written for a Digital Technologies teacher, and the connections on the board are marked automatically. For a school that would rather see it run first, we can come in and run it with a class.

How does it fit the curriculum?

Cybersecurity is explicitly in Digital Technologies: by Level 8 students explain how data is secured in networks and describe threats, and by Level 10 they model and evaluate threats and vulnerabilities. The mapping is supplied in the shape of VCAA’s own curriculum-area mapping template so it can go straight into an existing unit map.

PILOT PROGRAMS FOR 2027

Put Range Zero in front of your class

Tell us what your school teaches and when you have the class, and we will work out what suits.

Talk to us about it

Or email hello@ferressystems.com.au and ask for the teacher pack, the technical requirements or the data handling statement.