Page 27 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

of digital literacy by the Dutch National institute for curriculum development 1 (Dutch: Stichting leerplanontwikkeling, SLO), which is described as containing
four elements: ICT skills, Media wisdom, Computational thinking and Information
skills (Computational thinking, 2020; Thijs et al., 2014a). The big assignments are
situated in three contexts: personal life, society, and, education and profession.
It is expected that this curriculum.nu initiative — and in particular its domain digital literacy — will fill the gap signaled in the report by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) by providing the desired subject Information & communication in the lower grades of secondary education, albeit under a different name. It is also presumed that digital literacy will seamlessly tie into the Computer Science (CS) course in the upper grades of secondary education (described in detail in chapter 2), as recommended in the new 2019 curriculum
for the Computer Science (CS) document (Barendsen & Tolboom, 2016).
One might think that students who follow a computer science course would become proficient at computational thinking spontaneously — a wish harbored by many a secondary school computer science teacher. Furthermore, secondary CS education should cater not only to those of the students who plan to pursue careers in computer science or some related field, but first and foremost to the majority of the students who will chose to do something else (Guzdial, 2019). Therefore, the question arises, what aspect of computational thinking tends to be underexposed in the typical CS classroom, as well as important and meaningful to all of the secondary CS students, thus deserving more of our attention. The answer is modeling and simulation — a set of new learning objectives introduced in the 2019 secondary CS curriculum in the Netherlands. As described in section 3.1, this curriculum unites modeling and simulation under the name Computational Science2 and provides the following description: “Modeling: The candidate is able to model aspects of a different scientific discipline in computational terms” and “Simulation: The candidate is able to construct models and simulations, and use these for the research of phenomena in that other science field.” Additionally, modeling itself is to be a part of the compulsory core curriculum, described as “Modeling: The candidate is able to use context to analyze a relevant problem, limit this to a manageable problem, translate this into a model, generate and interpret model results, and test and assess the model. The candidate is able to use consistent
reasoning.” (Barendsen & Tolboom, 2016).
2 In this thesis, we use terms modeling, modeling & simulation and Computational Science interchangeably, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Introduction
25