Page 18 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 1
on algorithmic/computational thinking concepts (Wilson, 2010). Subsequently, the federal government has put forward and funded a number of initiatives to support and advance the CS education, for example Every Student Succeeds Act (Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 2015) and President Obama’s CS For All (CS For All, 2016).
In the Netherlands, CS has been an established elective subject in the higher grades of secondary education since 1998, as described in detail in chapter 2. In addition to this subject focusing on computing as a scientific discipline, in the lower grades of secondary education, in the late 1990’s and 2000’s, there used to be a course focusing on ICT which often got integrated in other courses and in the long run died out. In 2012, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (in Dutch: De Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, further abbreviated as KNAW) published a report expressing their concerns about teaching CS and recommended to not only overhaul the existing elective CS subject, but also to introduce a new compulsory subject Information & communication in the lower grades of secondary education (KNAW, 2012). The Dutch situation is described in greater detail in chapter 2.
The situation in the few countries described here is illustrative of the evolution of CS education both from the point of view of institutionalized education reforms — ranging from no CS education to introduction of mandatory CS education for all students, as well as the related intertwined changing and evolving aims and objectives of teaching CS — from specialist professional training to fundamental life skills. We also see that, as omnipresent and multifaceted the computers and their usage are in our modern world, so is the discussion about the necessity and aims of teaching CS and the position CS courses get in the curriculum. This great variation notwithstanding, the spirit of time is clearly visible in the desire to make the CS education available to all students in K-12 and to focus on computational problem-solving (Tedre et al., 2018).
This spirit, expressing the desire to empower all students by teaching them certain aspects typical for CS, was captured in the 2006 seminal article by Wing who rekindled the notion of computational thinking (CT) first introduced by Papert (1980) by asserting that, “to reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability” (Wing, 2006). Wing globally sketches what CT is and what it is not in her view and stresses that it is about attitude and a skill set for everyone, not just computer scientists.