WIPSCE

Preparing teachers to teach computing is more than a matter of re-purposing existing courses for computer science majors. The tasks, knowledge, and skills of a computing teacher in primary or secondary school are dramatically different than that of a ...

Most research in primary and secondary computing education has focused on understanding learners within formal classroom communities, leaving aside the growing number of promising informal online programming communities where young learners contribute, ...

In the Flemish secondary education curriculum, as in many countries and regions, computer science currently only gets an extremely limited coverage. Recently, in Flanders (and elsewhere), it has been proposed to change this, and try-outs are undertaken, ...

Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer-science (CS) and other scientific disciplines. This paper examines the ways CS thinking patterns can contribute to achieving high levels of abstraction in physics. We examined the work of high school ...

This paper argues that the "institutionalised understanding" of pseudo-code as a blend of formal and natural languages makes it an unsuitable choice for national assessment where the intention is to test program comprehension skills. It permits question-...

In the last few years, the focus of data management has changed from handling relatively small amounts of data, often in relational databases, to managing large amounts of data using various different database types. In many secondary school curricula, ...

Software engineering is a sub-discipline of computer science, and an important focus of the movement to bring CS education to New York City public schools. From the ACM, Software Engineering is about developing and maintaining software systems. The ...

After the recent introduction of Computer Science into New Zealand High Schools, a lack of coherent resources for the new topics has created challenges for teachers and students working with the new qualifications. In response to this, a "Computer ...

This paper presents the results of an experiment regarding the effects of using one of two different programming environments in secondary schools. Both "Scratch" and "Karel the Robot" have been successfully used in these settings previously. These two ...

There has been considerable interest in teaching "coding" to primary school aged students, and many creative "Initial Learning Environments" (ILEs) have been released to encourage this. Announcements and commentaries about such developments can polarise ...

Identity development and personal experience have been drawn attention to in recent Computing education research addressing low engagement and retention or stereotypes and the gender gap in Computing. However, these findings have rarely been discussed ...

The current focus on computer science in the school curriculum in many countries has led to concerns about how teachers will manage this change and rise to the challenge of the new curriculum. In-service teachers have a need for professional development ...

Many countries are introducing new school computing syllabuses that make programming and computational thinking core components. However, many of the teachers involved have major knowledge, skill and pedagogy gaps. We have explored the effectiveness of ...

This study examined students' misconceptions about the central processing unit (CPU) and how these could be destabilized, by utilizing the framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge and the instructional design model of Technology Mapping. ...

The paper briefly describes a team non-programming competition in algorithmic and combinatorial puzzle-like problem solving, developed by the authors and organized for 7-9^th grade middle school students from Poznań district (Poland)in 2014.

A children's university in Poland is a popular, organized form of inviting young children to activities which are offered and run by academic teachers. We have been involved in such initiatives whose goal is to introduce children to some concepts in ...

In Austria Informatics is not taught in primary schools, but the curriculum includes some issues in several subjects that are related to computational thinking. Teachers are not aware that they already teach and use informatics concepts in their daily ...

We describe our approach to measure teachers' knowledge of students' cognition and present first results of a preliminary survey done with student teachers. This is the initial utilization of our test instrument, which aims to measure competencies ...

An enormous challenge to computing education in secondary schools worldwide is the lack of secondary computer science teachers. The Institute for Computing Education (ICE) has been offering teacher professional development in an attempt to increase the ...

While working for a new presence of Informatics in schools we face the compelling problem of in-service teachers training. Related solutions must consider the different needs of the different teachers. Besides, the serious lack of skilled teachers ...

Competent use of language and specifically classroom language are key factors for successful learning. Thus, being 'fluent with information technology', 'CS fluency and competency', 'computer literacy' or 'computational literacy' are terms for learning ...

The term Computational Thinking (CT) was introduced in 2006 by J. M. Wing to indicate a set of analytical skills regarded necessary for the youth in the modern information society [11]. We describe an ongoing research project on CT skills in the ...

This paper presents research results of the school experiment InTech (Informatics with technical aspects) where Informatics was established as a subject in the grades 7 to 9 in 13 schools in northern Germany. From 2009 to 2012 the initially 24 teachers ...

To test and adopt the methodology of future PISA surveys in Computer Science, we have utilized the Bebras Contest as a test field. We performed latent trait analysis of the questions of the German Bebras contest 2009 to find sets of questions that might ...

As in modern approaches to software engineering, agile practices are increasingly receiving attention in CS education in order to address issues that are commonly reported with linear methodologies. Developing a sustainable agile model for a classroom ...

We introduce a novel classification scheme for problem solving and programming scenarios in computer science education based on the relations between problem complexity, student capability and features of the technological platform. We extend this to a ...

This paper proposes a teaching method that utilizes video games in computer science education. The primary characteristic of this approach is that it utilizes video games as observational materials. The underlying idea is that by observing the ...

Until recently, software development dominated the creative and design-oriented parts of computer science education. Within the last years, more and more approaches have also focused on using programmable hardware in different settings, mostly ...

Petri nets are a graphic and dynamic model type for interactive and distributed systems. They have been proposed for secondary CS education before but existing discussions are superficial at best. We present the results of a qualitative evaluation of ...