Page 63 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Twenty Years of Computer Science in Dutch Secondary Education
We see that CS, now clearly visible in the upper secondary education, has gained that much momentum, that it could possibly contribute to reforms in the Dutch educational system.
2.3.7 Conclusion and Discussion 2 In this chapter, we described the present situation of the elective CS course in
upper secondary education in the senior general secondary education (HAVO)
and the pre-university education (VWO) in the Netherlands, the CS curriculum
reform together with the events leading to it and we sketched the developments
related to teaching CS in primary and lower secondary education. We see that on
one hand, significant progress has been made with five universities offering regular
teacher training (in the fall of 2019 joined by both universities in Amsterdam: the
University of Amsterdam and the VU Amsterdam), a nation-wide research group
performing research of international relevance and a grassroots movement with
parents, teachers, headmasters and other stakeholders demanding more, earlier
and broader CS education. On the other hand, the teacher population forms one
of the weak spots in the CS ecosystem: many teachers are underqualified, far too
few new CS teachers are being trained, and it is not clear who should teach CS or
digital literacy if it gets introduced into primary and lower secondary education.
Some stakeholders see the CS curriculum reform as a missed opportunity to make
CS a mandatory subject or for the introduction of a national exam. Finally, it is
not clear yet what will happen with the desire and all the initiatives employed to
introduce CS, in whatever form, into the primary and lower secondary education.
However, in 2015, when the contours of the new 2019 CS curriculum
became visible and it was clear that it was going to contain the elective theme Computational Science, we decided to embark on this research project to explore
the pedagogical aspects of teaching Computational Science in the Computer
Science course in secondary education in the Netherlands, and the result is this
thesis.
61