Computer Science Education in Schools
Special Issue of The ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)

Recent activities in several countries, for example in the USA, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and South Korea, show a growing awareness of the importance of rigorous computer science education (CSE) for a successful, self-responsive and self-deciding life in the modern world. Consequently, serious efforts are made to introduce or to improve CSE in schools that will be followed by other countries, as we hope. Yet, for any country that wants to improve CSE in schools, it would be advisable to learn from the experiences that were made somewhere else. Nevertheless, those experiences were gathered under preconditions and circumstances that usually differ strongly from country to country. Unfortunately, the short format of conventional scientific papers prevents most reports about such experiences from covering all relevant aspects of the respective context. To produce relief, this Special Issue of TOCE aims to collect extensive, detailed case studies that discuss as many relevant aspects as possible, for example regarding the category system that was proposed in 2011 by the ITiCSE Work- ing Group about Informatics in Secondary Education [1]. According to this system, the studies should take into consideration the following issues:

educational or school system,
specific socio-cultural related factors (history of ICT and CS in school, age, gender, social and immigration background of students, family socialization, public opinion, techno-economic development),
research, funding, education policies, quality management,
education, qualification and professional experience of teachers,
motivation of students and teachers,
intended learning objectives, competencies or standards,
intended knowledge about computer science,
curriculum issues,
examination and certification of students,
applied or proposed teaching methods,
related extracurricular activities,
technical infrastructure,
applied, proposed or developed media (textbooks, soft- or hardware tools, visualization or other didactical software, unplugged media),
results, outcomes or consequences.

The editors ask stakeholders or educational researchers to submit elaborated, particularized reports about the situation, the changes or the perspectives of CSE in a certain country or state. Preference will be given to papers that are based on empirical research. In order to give an example, a preceding study was published in TOCE recently [2].

The contributions to this Special Issue could be used by national stakeholders arguing in favor of a subject of Computer Science, by curriculum designers that have to decide which approach an upcoming national initiative should follow, by researchers as a framework for their studies about CSE in schools or by teacher educators as a 'look over the fence'. This should bring the different communities together, triggering new dialogues and enabling the countries to learn from each other.

A preliminary one-page abstract of the paper is due April 1. Feedback will be provided to authors by May 1, regarding relevance of the proposed paper with respect to the Special Issue. Full papers submissions are due July 1, with publication expected in 2014. Submissions must be done via Manuscript Central (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/toce). In the cover letter, please indicate that the paper is for the Special Issue on Computer Science Education in Schools. More information about the TOCE review criteria can be found on http://toce.acm.org/authors.html.

Links to additional information:

http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/computing-in-schools/
http://www.computingportal.org/cs10k http://www.csprinciples.org
http://www.exploringcs.org http://www.informatik-im-kontext.de
http://csta.acm.org/Curriculum/sub/CompThinking.html
Associate Editor:

Peter Hubwieser, Technische Universität München, Germany

Guest Editors:

Michal Armoni, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel,
Valentina Dagiene, Vilnius University, Lithuania,
Michail N. Giannakos, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, Roland T. Mittermeir, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria.

References

[1] Hubwieser, P., Armoni, M., Brinda, T., Dagiene, V., Diethelm, I., Giannakos, M. N., Knobelsdorf, M., Magenheim, J., Mittermeir, R. T., and Schubert, S. E. 2011. Computer science/informatics in sec- ondary education. In Proceedings of the 16th annual conference reports on Innovation and technology in computer science education - working group reports. ITiCSE-WGR '11. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19-38.

[2] Hubwieser, P.: Computer Science Education in Secondary Schools - The Introduction of a New Compulsory Subject. Trans. Comput. Educ. 12(4), 16:1-16:41 (2012).