Page 46 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Chapter 2
During the period 2000 – 2006, the number of secondary education graduates with CS has been on the decrease and seemed to be stabilizing at around ten percent (of the total student population) (Schmidt, 2007).
Setting aside the start-up difficulties in the beginning, a clear picture of the problems encountered and of the accomplishments realized has emerged. From the teachers’ point of view, the curriculum was ostensibly too broad and extensive (in terms of available teaching time), forcing them to skip parts of it. Concerning this same issue, they experienced difficulty in judging the amount of attention and time to be given to particular terms. The three textbooks10 (Bergervoet et al., 2001; Meijer et al., 2001; Van der Laan et al., 2001) on the market did not help much in solving this problem, since each of them had different approaches to the subject matter. Therefore, many teachers were forced to resort to writing their own teaching material (much of which has now been made available to other teachers through the online community on www.informaticavo.nl). This situation, however, was not just perceived as a problem; it was also seen as an opportunity to pay more attention to the subject matter that students and/or teachers themselves found interesting. With this in mind, many teachers were happy that there was no national exam putting pressure on them to work out minutely all of the 53 curriculum terms in the class. In a country where we are used to national exams that ensure the level of students’ accomplishments and then serve as gateways to higher education, this has caused quite understandable concerns. What guarantees are there that students attending different schools will end up acquiring a similar body of knowledge? At the moment, since CS is not a prerequisite for any study in higher education, this does not really matter. However, there is an occasional discussion about whether there should be a national exam for CS. The details of this discussion will be described in the section 2.2.3, Discussions.
Bearing in mind that virtually all of the CS teachers come from a non-CS background, it is not surprising to see differing interpretations of the curriculum. In some cases, CS in the classroom has ended up being treated as an exact science, and in some cases the emphasis is put on the use of particular software applications, none of which is in line with curriculum objectives. The picture that students, their parents, and even guidance counselors and other school officials had about CS was often limited and did not fit the broad perspective it was supposed to provide. The experiences of the authors of the original paper (Grgurina & Tolboom, 2008) are
10 These textbooks all consisted of several separate volumes and were accompanied by CD - ROMs and dedicated websites.
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