A Global Snapshot of Computer Science Education in K-12 Schools

Abstract

In two special issues of the ACM journal "Transactions on Computing Education" (TOCE), 14 extensive case studies about the various situations of Computer Science Education (CSE) in K-12 schools in 12 countries (respectively states) were collected. During the work at the ITiCSE 2015, we have performed a deductive qualitative text analysis on these case studies in order to extract the most useful information. As a category system, we applied some selected categories of the Darmstadt Model that was developed by the working group "Computer Science/Informatics in Secondary Schools" at the ITiCSE 2011. Based on the coding results, we summarized information about the different fields of Computing Education at schools, the intended goals and competencies, the taught content, the applied programming languages and tools and the different forms of assessment and teacher education. Despite the limitations of the analyzed articles, representing just snapshots of complex situations from the specific viewpoint of the respective authors, we were able to collect some interesting results.