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Chapter 2
to fifty percent of the final grade (College voor Toetsen en Examens, 1998). The practical nature that the course in CS was intended to have is thus emphasized once again by prescribing that practical assignments and/or a project should contribute to at least fifty percent of the final grade.
For the 2007 curriculum it was suggested that the assessment should contain the following parts:
A. Written examination.
B. Practical assignments.
C. Project.
Part A should contribute at least ten percent and at most fifty percent towards
the final grade, and part B/C at least fifty percent and at most ninety percent. The grade for part B/C is the arithmetic mean of the grades for parts B and C (Schmidt, 2006).
2.2.1.7 Teacher Training
Prior to the 1998 modifications to the educational system in the Netherlands, there was a small number of teachers teaching CS at their own initiative. These lessons were optional and consisted mostly of programming activities. The teachers developing these activities were usually mathematics or science teachers (Tolboom, 1999). There was no formal CS teacher training. When the decision was taken to introduce CS in the upper grades of senior secondary education and pre-university education, there were a lot of concerns. One of the most urgent was that there were no teachers to teach this course. In considerable haste, CODI9, a consortium of 12 universities and universities of applied science, was set up to join forces in training teachers, who were to be responsible for the implementation of the CS course in their schools. In the period between 1998 and 2005, those schools that planned to introduce CS sent a teacher each for in-service training. Whereas elsewhere prospective CS teachers were expected to possess extensive knowledge of the subject (Gal-Ezer, 1995), these teachers were by no means required to have any prior knowledge of CS and were only expected to be computer literate at a satisfactory level. In order to obtain their teaching license for CS, they had to complete a two-year program of about 45 ECTS. This program consisted of the following parts: (MinOC&W, 1998).
9 CODI is the Dutch acronym for the Computer Science Teacher Education Consortium (in Dutch: Consortium Omscholing Docenten Informatica).
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