Page 89 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

Investigating CS Teachers’ Initial PCK on Modeling and Simulation
grade as well, without ever having taught any CS before that”. He also stresses the importance of re-activating the knowledge the students already possess.
The issues teachers regard as successful:
• Relevance: through modeling, learning about familiar phenomena
encountered in other courses (e.g. biology, economy) rather than distant ideas. As teacher 6 puts it: “You concoct nice stories about nuclear power plants, but how many children end up in there?”
• Perception: attitude, experiencing success, interest and fun,
and student’s characteristics. Several teachers expect students’
confidence would grow through their perseverance when facing
problems and experiencing success by making a model on their
own. Teacher 2 admits that achieving this with his students poses 4 a challenge. Numerous teachers expect these aspects, together with
the relevance experienced by students and the possibility to come up with creative solutions and implementation of students’ own ideas, to make modeling interesting and fun. Teacher 10 mentions Gardner’s multiple intelligences to explain why he expects students in science tracks to perform differently than students in humanities tracks.
• Skills: programing and computational thinking. Most teachers expect that programming the models would not pose a problem.
• Organizational issues: teaching strategies to meet students’ needs.
Several teachers describe how to contribute to the students’ success by choosing a suitable teaching approach. A number of teachers who intend to use NetLogo to teach modeling prize its user-friendliness and see this as a success factor.
• Interest and fun: Teacher 5 says, “even if I never teach this, I still find it fun for myself” and goes on to reflect how to transfer this enthusiasm to his students.
• Finally, teachers 1, 3, 4 and 9 do not know what to say. As teacher 4 puts it, “I’ve never taught modeling, so I wouldn’t know what would be a success.”
The issues teachers regard as difficult:
• Technical issues: programing and computational thinking, aspects
of modeling and development. For example, the meaning of the
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