Fredrik Heintz
Linda Mannila
ABSTRACT
The Swedish government has recently introduced digital competence including programming in the Swedish K-9 curriculum starting no later than fall 2018. This means that 100 000 teachers need to learn programming and digital competence in less than a year. In this paper we report on our experience working with professional teacher training in Sweden's fifth largest city. The city has about 150 000 inhabitants and about 50 schools with about 14 000 students in primary education. The project has been carried out in close cooperation with the municipality.
The work started in the fall of 2014 with a pilot study with 10 teachers in different subjects that was carried out during spring 2015. The pilot study was successful as the teachers were able to introduce activities related to programming and computational thinking in their subjects after only two half day workshops. The next step was to scale this up to include all the schools in the city. As expected, this turned out to be a larger challenge. More than 70 teachers were involved in the second part of the project. Some of the lessons learned are that it is quite easy to provide teacher training, but harder to get teachers to actually change their teaching and even more challenging to get teachers to help their colleagues introduce programming or computational thinking in their teaching.
Based on our experience we draw some general conclusions and make suggestions for how to scale up the teaching of programming and computational thinking to all.
- A. Balanskat and K. Engelhardt. Computing our future. computer programming and coding. priorities, school curricula and initiatives across europe, 2015.Google Scholar
- T. Bell, I. H. Witten, and M. Fellows. CS Unplugged -- An enrichment and extension programme for primary-aged students. 2015.Google Scholar
- Department for Education. National curriculum in England: Computing programmes of study, 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study.Google Scholar
- Digitaliseringskommissionen. En digital agenda i m"anniskans tj"anst : en ljusnande framtid kan bli vår : delbet"ankande. Technical Report SOU 2014:13, 2014.Google Scholar
- Finnish National Board of Education. Perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2014, 2014.Google Scholar
- F. Heintz, L. Mannila, and T. F"arnqvist. A review of models for introducing computational thinking, computer science and computing in k-12 education. In Proc. IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2016.Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Heintz, L. Mannila, L.-Å. Nordén, P. Parnes, and B. Regnell. Introducing programming and digital competence in swedish k--9 education. In Proc. ISSEP, 2017.Google ScholarCross Ref
- F. Heintz, L. Mannila, K. Nygårds, P. Parnes, and B. Regnell. Computing at school in sweden -- experiences from introducing computer science within existing subjects. In Proc. ISSEP, 2015.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Informatics Europe and ACM Europe. Informatics in education: Europe cannot afford to miss the boat, 2015. Report of the joint Informatics Europe and ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education.Google Scholar
- L. Rolandsson and I.-B. Skogh. Programming in school: Look back to move forward. Trans. Comput. Educ., 2(14):12:1--12:25, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Skolverket. Få syn på digitaliseringen på grundskolnivå, June 2017.Google Scholar
- Stephanie Carretero Gomez and Riina Vuorikari and Yves Punie. DigComp 2.1: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens with eight proficiency levels and examples of use, 2017.Google Scholar
- White House. Computer science for all, 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/01/30/computer-science-all.Google Scholar
- J. Wing. Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3):33--35, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Computational Thinking for All: An Experience Report on Scaling up Teaching Computational Thinking to All Students in a Major City in Sweden
Recommendations
Teaching how to teach computational thinking
ITiCSE 2018: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationComputational Thinking is argued to be an essential skill for the workforce of the 21st century. As a skill, Computational Thinking should be taught in all schools, employing computational ideas integrated into other disciplines. Up until now, questions ...
Computational thinking in high school courses
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science educationThe number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines ...
From Professional Development to the Classroom: Findings from CS K-12 Teachers
SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science EducationThe CS for All initiative places increased emphasis on the need to prepare K-12 teachers of computer science (CS). Professional development (PD) programs continue to be an essential mechanism for preparing in-service teachers who have little formal ...
Comments