Page 35 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Chapter 2
Twenty Years of Computer Science
in Dutch Secondary Education
Computer science (CS) is currently being taught in secondary education all over the world. In the Netherlands, where all students were expected to become computer literate in the lower grades of secondary education (Hulsen et al., 2005) it has been decided not to consider computer literacy as being part of CS. What, then, should be the content of the CS curriculum taught in the higher grades? What should be taught, how and to whom? How should students’ achievements be assessed? The answers to these questions completely depend on defining what the objectives of teaching CS are. In the first part of this chapter, these objectives are discussed, along with the content of the Dutch secondary education CS Curriculum when the course was first introduced in 1998, and the experiences resulting from the initial implementation of this curriculum during its first decade, including the setting in which CS found itself.
In the second part of this chapter, we describe the second decade of CS in the Netherlands: CS reached adulthood with established teacher training programs and a new curriculum which is introduced in 2019. Here we describe the events and processes that led to the renewal of the curriculum, the curriculum itself with the principles it is based on and its aims, the current process of teaching material development, the related research, the teacher training, curriculum reform in primary and lower secondary education, and the current situation of CS as an upper secondary school subject, together with the challenges it still faces. From this description of the educational context in the Netherlands also follows the rationale for our research.
This chapter is based on articles Grgurina, N., & Tolboom, J. (2008). The First Decade of Informatics in Dutch High Schools. Informatics in Education, 7(1), 55- 74 and Grgurina, N., Tolboom, J., & Barendsen, E. (2018), and The Second Decade of Informatics in Dutch Secondary Education. In International Conference on Informatics in Schools: Situation, Evolution, and Perspectives (pp. 271-282). Springer, Cham.