Computer science education – Quo vadis?
Juraj Hromkovic has over 15 years of experience in teaching children computer science. He explains the approach we should take.
Let me first tell you about Martha, an unremarkable girl who wasn’t considered a particularly strong student. When she was in sixth grade, the project "Programmieren in die Schule" was introduced to her school. Martha set to work enthusiastically and was unbelievably quick to finish the tasks. But that wasn’t all – she was a great asset in class, helping other students solve their programming tasks and even explaining them better than the teacher. In the programming competition held after 20 lessons, she not only solved all the tasks correctly, but also completed three tricky additional ones. No child had ever managed that before, and it’s how Martha's great talent was recognised.
To date, some 12,000 children in more than 200 schools throughout Switzerland have taken part in the kind of teaching projects we’ve developed. And what have we seen? Enthusiastic children, driven by a sense of achievement as they develop their own functional products by themselves. The motivation was so strong that a few teachers used programming to improve the children's concentration or even address a lack of it.
Critical thinking
So there’s no reason to have any reservations about computer science as a new subject on the teaching curriculum. It’s more a question of “How can we turn a school subject with a poor image (see blog post by Bernd G?rtner) into a popular one?” There are many subtleties to pay attention to if we want to develop sound teaching practice from primary school through to high school. In my opinion, two basic principles must be interlinked:
Firstly, we need more critical thinking in our schools. Critical thinking means not just focusing on learning known facts and existing models or methods. It’s more about the processes of how knowledge is generated and how we develop our own ideas. For me, the emphasis is on gaining experience, trying to solve problems and thus understanding facts. It’s about formulating and testing own hypotheses, about creative work on ideas and testing whether they work.
"The first major step in digitisation was the invention of the first typefaces."Juraj Hromkovic
Secondly, we should return to Jean Piaget's constructivism. The Swiss developmental psychologist strongly believed that children's development and learning emerged from their personal interaction with their environment, and that pupils should independently and actively create meanings and connections. Computer science lessons are absolutely perfect for constructivist learning!
Rooted in history
Few people know that the origins of computer science date back more than 5,000 years. Who’s aware that 'digital' means presenting information as a sequence of symbols? The first major step in digitisation was the invention of the first writings thousands of years ago. Along with the first writings, the need for data security emerged – a topic which is so central nowadays.
Teaching computer science through this historical dimension is key as today’s children will be tomorrow’s critical users or even contributors to the future development of digital technology. What’s more, the historical perspective allows understanding computer science in the context of the whole science, which promotes basic language and mathematics skills. We therefore use this approach in "Einfach Informatik", our series of teaching resources for the 5th-9th grades. Here children and adolescents learn not only how to apply the concepts, but also how to develop their own solutions and improve the concepts. Which all creates a sense of achievement.
The way forward
Besides the scientific and didactic aspects, there is of course a political dimension to computer science teaching. Convincing society that it was necessary to introduce a new subject – even an attractive and essential one – was no easy task. Convincing pupils, teachers, parents and politicians that it was imperative to teach computer science was a long, arduous process. Now we must consider in which direction computer science teaching is to develop. The question is: Who takes care that we do not merely teach to reflect the use of digital technology, instead that we teach to control and to further develop it? I hope that children and young people will not only be taught how to use digital technologies. This is an important aspect, but – in my opinion – not the central one.