Page 26 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Chapter 1
To the CSER researchers, students’ learning is traditionally of interest, and this topic is accompanied by interest in teaching methods, pedagogy and learnability; assessment issues and learning analytics; tools, and curricular aspects. Moving outside the classroom, we see interest in professional development of teachers; participation and equity issues, blended and informal learning experiences; and social and global challenges in CS education. Furthermore, we observe a growing demand for academic rigor in CSER and a continuous encouragement to conduct a sound academic debate on new or unresolved issues.
1.2 Situation in the Netherlands
We turn our attention to the Netherlands to explain the situation of the educational context where this project was carried out and to motivate the specific research questions.
We see that teaching CT problem-solving skills did not get enough attention from policy makers and was hardly represented in school curricula in general (Barendsen & Zwaneveld, 2010), and that the situation of the elective Computer Science (CS) course in the upper grades of secondary education was far from thriving, as described in chapter 2. However, recent developments are promising: since the fall of 2019, the Computer Science (CS) course in the upper grades of secondary education is taught according to a new curriculum (described in more detail in section 2.3.3). For the K-9 education (i.e., elementary schools and lower grades of secondary education — see figure 2), there is a plethora of initiatives to advance digital literacy, media wisdom, ICT skills, information skills, computational thinking, programming, coding, and any combination of these. One of them is the nationwide curriculum.nu1 initiative where teachers and school administrators cooperate on a project to overhaul the whole of the K-9 curriculum and define it in terms of nine connected and coherent domains; one of them is to be the new domain Digital literacy.
Digital literacy is described in terms of big assignments that express the essence of the discipline: Communicating and collaborating, Digital citizenship, Data and information, Using and managing, Applying and designing, Digital economy, Security and privacy, and finally, Sustainability and innovation. All of these big assignments encompass four perspectives: dealing with, thinking over, creating with, and, knowledge of. These perspectives are all connected to the interpretation
1 Https://curriculum.nu
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