Computational Thinking in K-9 Education
Linda Mannila Valentina Dagiene
Åbo Akademi University Vilnius University
Turku, Finland Vilnius, Lithuania
linda.mannila@abo.fi valentina.dagiene@mii.vu.lt
Natasa Grgurina Claudio Mirolo
University of Groningen University of Udine
Groningen, Netherlands Udine, Italy
n.grgurina@rug.nl claudio.mirolo@uniud.it
Amber Settle
DePaul University
Chicago, USA
asettle@cdm.depaul.edu
ABSTRACT
In this report we consider the current status of the coverage
of computer science in education at the lowest levels of edu-
cation in multiple countries. Our focus is on computational
thinking (CT), a term meant to encompass a set of concepts
and thought processes that aid in formulating problems and
their solutions in different fields in a way that could involve
computers [130].
The main goal of this report is to help teachers, those
involved in teacher education, and decision makers to make
informed decisions about how and when CT can be included
in their local institutions. We begin by defining CT and then
discuss the current state of CT in K-9 education in multiple
countries in Europe as well as the United States. Since many
students are exposed to CT outside of school, we also discuss
the current state of informal educational initiatives in the
same set of countries.
An important contribution of the report is a survey dis-
tributed to K-9 teachers, aiming at revealing to what ex-
tent different aspects of CT are already part of teachers’
classroom practice and how this is done. The survey data
suggest that some teachers are already involved in activi-
ties that have strong potential for introducing some aspects
of CT. In addition to the examples given by teachers par-
ticipating in the survey, we present some additional sample
activities and lesson plans for working with aspects of CT
in different subjects. We also discuss ways in which teacher
training can be coordinated as well as the issue of reposito-
ries. We conclude with future directions for research in CT
at school.
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permission and/or a fee.
ITiCSE-WGR’14, June 23-25, 2014, Uppsala, Sweden
Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3406-8/14/06 ...$15.00.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2713609.2713610.
1
Barbara Demo
University of Turin
Turin, Italy
barbara@di.unito.it
Lennart Rolandsson
KTH Royal Institute of
Technology
Stockholm, Sweden
lennartr@kth.se
1. INTRODUCTION
Lately we have witnessed an increasingly active conversa-
tion as to whether programming should be made an integral
part of school curricula at different levels. Initiatives such
as Code.org [23], Hour of Code [69] and European Code
Week [50] suggest that both educators and students should
give programming a try. These efforts have a particular em-
phasis on reaching a broad population. People from political
leaders to designers and engineers give official statements on
the importance of programming and computer science (CS)
for everyone [1, 87, 59, 60, 82, 112]. The conversation is
inspired by the realization that CS is no longer only impor-
tant for those who want to become computer scientists but
for everyone: “[c]omputer science develops students’ compu-
tational and critical thinking skills and shows them how to
create, not simply use, new technologies. This fundamental
knowledge is needed to prepare students for the 21st century,
regardless of their ultimate field of study or occupation” [27].
In addition, there is a need for “fix[ing] computing science’s
image,” since “we need to propagate informatics explicitly
as a field for people who ‘think’ about the properties and
structures of the information world we live in and join in
discovering how this world can be mastered” [126].
Currently, CS is not reaching the broadest audience pos-
sible, as the proportion of women and ethnic minorities re-
mains low [103]. Further complicating matters is a tendency
to emphasize digital literacy and consuming technology at
school, over dealing with the underlying principles, learning
to understand, and create technology.
There are examples of countries around the world where
programming or CS has been or will be introduced into early
childhood education. For instance, in Europe, the European
Schoolnet recently (October 2014) published a report sur-
veying the current situation in 20 European countries [51].
In 13 of these countries, programming is already or about
to be introduced in K-9 education. In seven of these, for
instance, Estonia, England and Greece, programming is in-
cluded as a compulsory part of the curriculum.
This common approach to computing is focused on prod-
ucts rather than processes and, as a consequence, the actual
treatments of data can neither be clearly conceptualized nor
verbalized [55]. As Bruillard (2004) points out, a careful in-
vestigation reveals “the lot of information known by pupils
without framework to organize them. More specifically, the
notion of processing was most of the times absent, only the
visible part of computers being recognized. [...] To summa-
rize, many users learn by approximation not by understand-
ing” [15].
The step from making a decision on including CS in the
curriculum to actually having educators teaching it is long
and riddled with questions. What should be taught? Should
it be integrated in other subjects or included as a subject
of its own? How will educators learn to teach it? What
material should be used?
The first of these questions would probably be the first
one to answer. What do we want to teach? CS in general?
Programming? Whereas CS may be considered too broad a
topic, programming (or coding) can be seen as too narrow.
In addition, both programming and CS are still associated
with many stereotypical misconceptions [20], which do not
help to make the topic interesting and motivating to a larger
audience.
In this paper, we focus on computational thinking (CT)
and different aspects of introducing it in the K-9 curriculum.
CT is a term encompassing a set of concepts and thought
processes from CS that aid in formulating problems and their
solutions in different fields. We focus on K-9 for several rea-
sons, the main one being that most of the previous work on
CT in education has been done at high school (upper sec-
ondary school) or university level. We want to focus more on
general education, which provides a different context. First,
it is compulsory and should provide opportunities to all stu-
dents, and second, teachers work with several or all subjects
for a given student group rather than being subject teach-
ers. The requirements at K-9 level are hence to make CT
accessible and motivating to a broad population, including
both teachers and their students, in a variety of subjects.
Our goal is to contribute to the discussion around early
education by 1) exploring the situation of CT in K-9 educa-
tion from different countries, 2) collecting current practices
on how CT is used in education using a survey instrument,
3) preparing ideas and guidelines for introducing and en-
hancing CT in education, including teacher professional de-
velopment, and 4) discussing the research opportunities that
arise from the introduction of CT in the classroom.
2. DEFINITIONS OF CT
The most recent use of the phrase CT began in 1996 when
Simon Papert mentioned the term in an article on mathe-
matics education [105]. Papert discussed using a computer
to solve problems in ways that “forge ideas” and that allow
people to better analyze and explain problems, solutions,
and the connections between them. A closely related con-
cept is found in computational literacy, by Vee [127]. In an
historical comparison Vee states that a modern approach
corresponding to the textual approach invented during the
medieval time is found in the analytical part of program-
ming. According to her computational literacy is the abil-
ity “to break a complex process down into small procedures
and then express — or ‘write’ — those procedures using the
technology of code that may be ‘read’ by a non-human entity
such as a computer” [127, p.47]. Whether or not program-
ming will be a mass literacy remains to be seen.
2
The term CT gained traction in 2006 when Jeannette
Wing suggested that it is “a universally applicable attitude
and skill set everyone, not just computer scientist, would
be eager to learn and use” [129]. She later gave a more
concrete definition, stating that CT can be understood as
“the thought processes involved in formulating problems and
their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form
that can be carried out by an information-processing agent”
[130]. Crucial for this latter definition is the idea that there
are layers of abstraction of both data and processes involved
in CT. Wing also elaborates on the definition of CT and dis-
tinguishes between what CT means for everyone and what
it means for scientists, engineers and professionals [130].
It is interesting to compare the definitions of CT as formu-
lated by Papert and Wing. There are certainly similarities
between the two definitions. Both Wing and Papert empha-
size reasoning: Papert talks about forging ideas and Wing
mentions thought processes. Both clearly indicate that CT
is about more than blindly applying a tool: Papert discusses
analyzing and explaining and Wing mentions the formula-
tion of problems. In either definition a computer may not be
involved in every step since Wing’s information-processing
agent may be something else than a computer. But compu-
tation is crucial at some point for both definitions. There is,
however, a difference in the two definitions. For Wing the
use of CT is unidirectional, with the fundamental question
being “what would I have to do to get a computer to im-
plement an existing solution to the problem?” Papert has a
more bidirectional definition. For him CS is used in concert
with other problem-solving approaches to develop new solu-
tion methods. This allows new ways of viewing a problem,
expanding the intersection of CS and other disciplines.
Finding a definition of CT that everyone agrees upon has
proved difficult for the CS education community, and mul-
tiple people and organizations have made efforts in that di-
rection [57, 56]. Among other contributions coming from
educators, Lee et al. (2011) [86] suggest that we should start
from practical examples of what we mean by CT, and iden-
tify the terms “abstraction,”“automation,” and “analysis” as
being particularly useful to understand how young pupils
can deal with novel problems.; they also propose the “use–
modify–create” progression for the engagement with com-
plex CS environments.
Moreover, other definitions or approaches to infuse CT in
early education in the light of learning theories are consid-
ered, for example, in [29, 70]. Interestingly, Lu and Fletcher
(2009) propose to develop a CT language — something dif-
ferent from a programming language — endowed with suit-
able vocabulary and notation to describe CT-related ideas
and processes in primary and secondary school” [94].
The definition used as a basis for the report at hand has
been developed by the International Society for Technology
in Education (ISTE1 ) and the American Computer Science
Teachers Association (CSTA2 ), who have both worked to
define CT and develop CT materials.
The CSTA and ISTE have proposed a definition of CT
suitable for use in K-12 education, identifying nine essential
concepts: data collection, data analysis, data representa-
tion, problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithms, au-
tomation, parallelization and simulation. Skills related to
1
The ISTE is a global organization serving educators [73]
2
The CSTA is an organization that supports and promotes
the teaching of CS and has existed since 2004 [31]
these concepts are not limited to CS or STEM3 subjects,
but can be practiced and developed within all disciplines,
which is crucial for broadening participation.
ISTE has also developed an operational definition for CT
as a problem-solving process with, for example, the following
characteristics [73]:
• Formulating problems in a way that enables us to use
a computer and other tools to help solve them
• Logically organizing and analyzing data
• Representing data through abstractions such as models
and simulations
• Automating solutions through algorithmic thinking (a
series of ordered steps)
• Identifying, analyzing, and implementing possible so-
lutions with the goal of achieving the most efficient
and effective combination of steps and resources
• Generalizing and transferring this problem solving pro-
cess to a wide variety of problems
These skills are “supported and enhanced by a number of
dispositions or attitudes that are essential dimensions of CT”
such as “confidence in dealing with complexity, persistence
in working with difficult problems, tolerance for ambiguity
and ability to deal with open ended problems” [31].
Members of the CSTA have also examined the ways that
CT can be brought into K-12 education, the barriers that
this process may face, and the ways that university educa-
tors can participate [4].
People outside of CS have also embraced CT. Their work
has helped to further refine the definition of the term CT
by providing examples from fields such as the sciences and
humanities. An excellent example of such work is that done
by the Shodor Foundation [117]. A non-profit organization
founded in 1994, Shodor provides materials and instruc-
tion relating to computational science. Based in the U.S.,
the foundation offers workshops, internships, and appren-
ticeships for students interested in science, technology, and
math.
3. CRITIQUE OF CT
Although CT has been embraced by many educators, it
is not uniformly accepted. One of the most vocal critics
of CT is Peter Denning. In his article “Beyond Computa-
tional Thinking” he raises two major objections to CT [40].
He first points out that CT has a long history especially in
the natural sciences, although it was described using other
terms such as “algorithmic thinking” in previous decades.
He argues that the new emphasis on CT is simply a repack-
aging of existing CS, and one that overly narrows the field.
He believes that the term CT has been so widely used by
people in the sciences that the term is not a valid way to
characterize the unique contributions of CS. He argues that
CT is a practice rather than a description of the principles
underlying field. It should be noted though that Denning’s
Great Principles of Computing are not incompatible with
CT, since at least one project focusing on CT uses the Great
Principles of Computing as its theoretical framework [106].
3 HCI community.
Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics
3
Denning’s critique can, however, be considered somewhat
irrelevant to early elementary or middle school education,
where a CT-oriented approach can be preferable to a sepa-
rate CS subject precisely because of its inherently interdis-
ciplinary nature that is particularly appropriate for young
children and, for different reasons, also for adolescents —
see, for example, [28, 5, 47]. On one hand, since primary
level teachers are usually general teachers, not specialized to
teach some specific subject, it seems more viable to include
CT as a means for solving problems in different contexts.
On the other hand, children’s learning and knowledge de-
velopment does not necessarily completely fit into a subject-
centered approach. According to Wood (2010), for instance,
children face difficulties in internalizing related information
received over a period of time “because of the differences in
their cognitive development and diversity” [132]. Moreover,
from a cognitive perspective the primary concern of early
education should be aimed at developing a suitable “cogni-
tive architecture” rather than building specific knowledge,
and “in this perspective, the crucial achievements are not
conceptual, but functional achievements” [48].
Other critics of CT object to the name for different rea-
sons than breadth or depth. David Hemmendinger argues
that the term CT has an arrogant tone, suggesting that com-
puter scientists are trying to tell people in other disciplines
how they should be thinking [67]. He suggests that inclu-
sive definitions of CT run the risk of seeming like territorial
grabs on the part of computer scientists who wish to take
approaches used widely in other disciplines and claim them
as belonging to CS. According to Hemmendinger, teaching
CT means to teach people “how to think like an economist,
a physicist, an artist, and to understand how to use com-
putation to solve their problems, to create, and to discover
new questions that can fruitfully be explored,” whereas we,
as computer scientists, we should perhaps “talk less about
computational thinking, and focus more on computational
doing” [67].
At least one critic of CT believes that the term is simply
too broad to be useful. In an essay entitled “The Trouble
with Computational Thinking” [74], Elizabeth Jones notes
that Jeannette Wing fails to give a definition for CT, instead
citing multiple examples in a wide range of areas to illustrate
the term. For Jones this is problematic because it makes it
difficult to see how it is that CT differs from other types
of thinking, such as artistic thinking or scientific thinking,
that require abstraction or massive amounts of data. She
also correctly points out that there are problems that cannot
be solved using computational methods, such as revising a
story or solving an ethical problem. Jones does concede
that if Wing’s goal is to point out that problem solving is a
process then she is supportive of that goal, at the same time
as Jones is troubled by the lack of a concrete definition of
CT.
In a blog post from 2011, Mark Guzdial suggests that CT
and human-computer interaction are ideological foes [66].
To support his point he discusses the goal of user-centered
design, which is to allow the user to focus on his/her task
and to make the computer invisible. In contrast CT involves
understanding the power and limitations of digital represen-
tations, which requires that both of those things are visible.
These goals are in obvious opposition to one another, which
leads him to suggest that CT will not be embraced by the
4. STATUS OF CT IN EDUCATION
The K-12 Computer Science Standards report [114] refers
to CT as a cross-disciplinary competence area for general
school education, although it remarks that “[d]eveloping an
approach to computational thinking that is suitable for K-
12 students is especially challenging in light of the fact that
there is, as yet, no widely agreed upon definition of compu-
tational thinking” [114].
In this section we draw a picture of the status of CT in
both formal and informal education. We first discuss the
role of programming, since learning to program can help de-
velop CT-related skills. In practice this means introducing
programming as a means to an end (“use programming to
learn X”), and not as an end in itself (“use programming as a
way to learn CS principles”). We then provide the authors’
local perspectives through country specific reports. The pur-
pose of these reports is to both discuss where and how CT is
already integrated into the K-9 curriculum in several coun-
tries in Europe and in the U.S. and also to imagine how CT
might be introduced more extensively. This section takes a
broad view of CT which includes related computing topics
and activities and also considers places in existing curric-
ula where CT is not currently taught but could be taught.
The section concludes by giving examples of different types
of informal initiatives that are taking place internationally
as well as more formal curricular initiatives that have been
developed in Europe and the U.S.
4.1 The role of programming
These days programming is re-packaged in all sorts of en-
vironments (e.g. board games and visual, block-based pro-
gramming tools) and gadgets (e.g. robots and paper cards)
useful when learning CT. The emphasis on programming —
or “coding” — is strong in both local and international dis-
cussions. Many of the informal initiatives, such as clubs and
curricular initiatives discussed in Section 4.3 below, seem to
first and foremost focus on programming, rather than CT
activities in general. Several educators agree that program-
ming is crucial for appreciating a computational perspective,
but the main objection is that it is unsuitable for lower levels
of education, as pointed out in, for instance, [94].
As remarked by Lu and Fletcher, “[p]erhaps the most con-
founding issue is the role of programming, and whether we
can separate it from basic computer science [94]. To com-
plicate matters further, it seems like the landscape of pro-
gramming in education is changing. Besides being a general
transferable skill, its uses have become broader than pre-
viously thought. In particular, programming can now be
interpreted as a means of self-expression and social partici-
pation [75, 113]; as a component of an emerging new form of
literacy [17, 127]; as a tool to conceive and create things, to
develop creativity [109, 13]; as a way for children to widen
their experience and experiment with their own ideas [12]
(following, in a sense, Papert’s ‘Mindstorms’ perspective);
or even as an instrument to foster children’s metacognition
[109]. In Schulte’s words, “the concept of ‘programming’ it-
self is vague and can be implemented in many different ways
[...]. [A] more precise understanding of (possible) pedagog-
ical or educational goals achievable by including program-
ming into the classroom is needed” [113].
Whereas traditional programming has been considered too
technical and too tedious to teach and learn for students at
school, here we discuss its role as a tool for addressing the
4
nine aspects of CT. Can the inclusion of programming in
teachers’ professional development and school curricula be
enough to address the domain of CT? The answer to that
question can be both yes and no, depending on what as-
sumptions are made and what is read into the term pro-
gramming (e.g. [12, 54]). If programming is seen as merely
“coding”, a routine job of giving instructions to the computer
in order to solve a set of traditional problems, we do not be-
lieve it is enough. Coding is a fraction of the programming
process, and can be seen as a task that you do last in or-
der to implement the solution that you have ended up with
through other phases such as analysis, decomposition and
design, which are all important parts of CT. Coding is also
associated with several misconceptions and image problems,
such as that of being an activity mainly suitable for male
nerds sitting isolated by their computers doing nothing but
hacking code and eating pizza.
If, however, programming is seen as the broader and more
multifaceted process that it is, we argue that it can be seen
as a tool for developing all CT aspects. By switching the
current discussions from coding to programming, and by be-
ing more detailed and explicit about what we mean, we be-
lieve that the image and conceptions of programming can be
changed into that of a problem-solving activity, which can
be used to address the different aspects of CT. In Section 6.1
we describe some general sample categories of CT-oriented
activities, where several provide concrete ideas for how pro-
gramming can be used.
In the following section we discuss the current curricula
in various European countries and the U.S. The aim of this
discussion is to both highlight where CT is currently in-
tegrated and identify places where it could be integrated
without a need for revising the curricula. It should be noted
that explicit programming activities remain unusual in most
countries discussed below, with some notable exceptions. In
a later section we discuss informal outreach activities, and
there it is much more common to see programming as a part
of the activities. The lack of programming in formal curric-
ula and the strong presence in informal outreach may be an
artifact of the people and organizations who design and run
the outreach programs as much as it is a side effect of a
lack of consensus on how and when programming should be
taught to children in K-9.
4.2 Country reports
4.2.1 Finland
In Finland, CS was part of the upper secondary curricu-
lum (grades 10–12) until the early 2000s, but was then com-
pletely removed. Instead ICT was to be integrated in all sub-
jects. Quite naturally, this resulted in a heavy focus on using
computers and tools instead of CS aspects, as teachers were
not used to or trained in the latter. In 2016, Finland will
get a new national curriculum for general education (grades
1-9), where special attention has been paid to recognizing
future competence needs. The current draft includes both
ICT-related skills and other more general abilities connected
to CT.
The draft emphasizes the need for students to acquire ba-
sic knowledge about ICT and its development and effects on
different areas of our society. More specifically, the following
skills are mentioned:
• Understanding central concepts and principles of how
 ICT works and is used and learn how to use ICT for
creating artifacts of their own. Programming is explic-
itly included in mathematics education, starting with
students giving instructions to each other in grades 1-
2, gradually moving towards graphical programming
environments in grades 3-6 and using programming
languages in grades 7-9. Programming should, how-
ever, not only be limited to mathematics, but also be
integrated in other subjects.
• Using ICT in responsible and safe ways
• Using ICT to look up information, which is clearly
related to data collection and analysis.
• Using ICT for communication and networking
In addition to these ICT-related skills, the draft also high-
lights several general and cross-curricular skills that can be
related to CT abilities:
• Looking up, evaluating, modifying, producing and shar-
ing information and ideas. Here exploratory and cre-
ative ways of working are considered important as they
facilitate practice of these skills.
• Viewing and critically analyzing things from different
perspectives.
• Being open to new solutions, using their imagination
and combining different perspectives in order to find
innovative solutions.
• Learning new things through, for example, play, games,
physical activity and experiments.
The upcoming introduction of programming in the core
curriculum has resulted in different initiatives facilitating
and supporting this reform. For instance, a teacher guide
called Koodi2016 (Code 2016) was published in early June
2014 with both state and industry support [91]. The Min-
istry of Culture and Education supports STEM education
for 6-16 year olds through a six-year long project (LUMA
SUOMI), in which programming plays an important role.
The National Board of Education, which is in charge of
the curricula reform, provides funding for professional de-
velopment aimed at in-service teachers as well as projects
related to the use of programming environments and tools
in schools. As for now, there is no particular focus on includ-
ing CT aspects, computing, or programming in pre-service
teacher training. Given the upcoming reform, this will have
to be changed to make sure that newly graduated teachers
have the knowledge and skill set needed to confidently teach
the required curriculum.
4.2.2 Italy
Between 2007 and 2012 the Italian school system under-
went a broad reform process, all aspects of which remain
to be finalized. The reform was meant to change both
the educational approach and the curricular organization.
The duration of compulsory education in Italy is now 10
years, usually corresponding to the age range 6–16, and is
organized in three main levels: primary school (elementary
school, grades 1–5), lower secondary school (middle school,
grades 6–8) and first biennium of the upper secondary school
5
(early high school, grades 9–10). In secondary schools differ-
ent disciplinary areas are taught by different teachers with
a related qualification.
For the grades K-8 CS and digital technologies are not in
the scope of a specific subject. According to the national
curricular recommendations, such content pertains to two
rather broad areas:
• A cross-disciplinary key citizenship digital competence
area,4 whose connections with CT are actually quite
weak (proficiency and critical attitude in the use of
ICTs for work, life, communication; use of computer to
retrieve, assess, retain, produce, present, share infor-
mation as well as to cooperate through the Internet).
• A general technology subject area, that includes the use
of the most common ICT tools and, “if possible,” some
computer and/or robot programming (proficiency and
critical attitude toward the psychological, social, cul-
tural impact of ICTs; if possible, introduction to pro-
gramming with simple languages, to create and de-
velop projects).
The reference to programming and robots is an attempt
to acknowledge some (seemingly) successful experiences pro-
moted by enthusiastic, self-motivated (and self-taught) teach-
ers.
The cross-disciplinary digital competence area spans the
whole period of compulsory education. However, either in
the first year (grade 9) or in the first two years (grades 9–10)
of the upper secondary level an independent informatics or
ICT-related subject, to be taught by qualified teachers, is
included in the curriculum of some types of schools. Along
with basic use of and basic notions about widespread plat-
forms and IT tools, which are competencies common to all
such syllabi, the students of applied sciences and of techni-
cal schools are expected to learn something about algorithms
and computer programming.
The only statement with a CT orientation in the official
documents can be found in the guidelines of the applied
science option of the scientific lyceum:
“The connection with the scientific disciplines,
but also with philosophy and Italian, should prompt
a reflection on the theoretical foundations of CS
as well as on its relationships with logic, on its
implications for scientific and technological method-
ologies, on its role on the emergence of new sci-
ences” [100].
The general framework of the education of pre-service
teachers was drawn in 2010, but its implementation has only
been completed for primary school. The programs for lower
and upper secondary are still in transition. Based on such
programs, however, prospective primary school teachers, as
well as middle school teachers of mathematics and sciences
4
The Italian Ministry for Education has adopted the “Rec-
ommendation of the European Parliament and of the Coun-
cil” of 18 December 2006 on key competences for life-
long learning (2006/962/EC): communication in the mother
tongue; communication in foreign languages; mathematical
competence and basic competences in science and technol-
ogy; digital competence; learning to learn; social and civic
competences; sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; cul-
tural awareness and expression.
and of technology, are likely to learn only some very ba-
sic digital literacy and are not prepared to deal with more
interesting CS topics.
In fact, the situation can be very different from school
to school, depending on the impact of individual initiatives
which exploit autonomy introduced by the reform. Indeed,
the contributions and creativity of motivated teachers can
give rise to interesting activities with their classes. Notable
examples in this respect are the introduction of student-
friendly programming environments like Scratch and the de-
velopment of educational robot laboratories.
4.2.3 Lithuania
In Lithuania CS is referred to as informatics (informatika).
Teaching informatics started in early 1980s with program-
ming and machine coding. The goal of teaching program-
ming is problem-solving transfer and also the idea that pro-
gramming is the best way to communicate with a machine
[25].
The Young Programmer’s School by Correspondence es-
tablished in 1981 was one of the first examples concerning
programming for all and had a strong impact on many phe-
nomena related to the teaching of informatics, such as the
development of curricula and establishment of various con-
tests and olympiads in informatics [37]. Many of the pro-
gramming lessons were published in the biggest daily news-
paper of Lithuania. Each took nearly half a page and were
published a few times per month for a number of years (1979-
1983). In parallel there was also a program on national
Lithuanian television for teaching algorithms and program-
ming. In 1985-1986 informatics was declared as a compul-
sory subject in high schools of the Soviet Union, including
Lithuania. The first textbook ”The basics of Informatics and
Computing Techniques” was written by famous Russian in-
formatics professors. The text was translated to Lithuanian
and was extended by adding a chapter on Pascal program-
ming language which had not been recognized at this time by
the Russian scientists. Informatics curriculum at this period
was aimed at the developing algorithms, thinking skills, ab-
straction, and automation of solving tasks, all tasks we now
recognize CT. Hundreds of interesting and appealing pro-
gramming tasks were developed for pupils. A selection of
challenging tasks “A hundred programming problems” was
published in Vilnius in 1986 and translated and published
in Moscow in 1993.
With regard to the changing role of ICT as well as with the
needs of pupils and school communities, the curricula of all
subjects in lower secondary schools (grades 5-10) were sub-
stantially revised in 2005, and ”Informatics” was changed to
”information technologies”. The new information technolo-
gies (IT) curriculum has been described in other publica-
tions[36]. Since 2005, the main focus in Lithuanian schools
is in developing computer literacy. As a result, the teaching
of the basics of informatics has become quite poor. Pupils
become familiar with the basics of informatics in grade 5
or 6, when they have their first IT lessons: part of them
should be focused on Logo or Scratch. However, very few
lessons are provided for this, and the teaching process de-
pends very closely on the knowledge and activeness of the
teachers themselves.
For lower secondary school, grades 9-10, there are 34 hours
in an optional module on algorithm design and writing (pro-
gramming) is recommended with the following basic topics:
6
• Conception of algorithms, ways of writing
• Programming languages, compilers
• Preparation of algorithms, coding, and running the
program
• Dialog between program and user
• Input and output of data, printing formats
• Main actions of algorithms: assignment, loop
• Simple data types
• Stages of program development
• Control data and correctness of program
• Programming style and culture
• Simplest algorithms and their implementation
Informatics in grades 9–10 introduces basic elements of
the subject and serves as a starting point for the informat-
ics education of all students in high schools and as a pre-
orientation for those students who might be interested in
choosing a high school which offers a specialization in CS
topics, such as algorithms, networking, or databases. The
IT subject in grades 5–10 is taught by IT teachers who have
various types of training. Some of them have a CS or math-
ematics degree combined with education, while others are
teachers of other subjects with little training in IT. New IT
and informatics curricula will be developed during next year
for grades 1-10 with special focus on the most important in-
formatics concepts and skills.
4.2.4 Netherlands
In the Netherlands, educational objectives are described in
rather general terms, and schools have the discretion to inde-
pendently implement the objectives in the classroom. Often
there are guides containing detailed interpretation of the ob-
jectives, but it is not compulsory to comply with them. In
practice, publishers interpret the core objectives and pub-
lish textbooks which are used as a basis for the teaching
activities.
The learning objectives for primary education (ages 4–
12) are summarized in 58 general core objectives describing
goals for the Dutch, Frisian, and English languages, arith-
metic/math, world and personal orientation, arts and phys-
ical education [80]. Only 10 of these objectives contain as-
pects of CT, for example, as follows:
Dutch language:
4. Students learn to find information in informative
and instructive texts, including schemes, tables and
digital resources
6. Students learn to order (rank, arrange) informa-
tion and opinions when reading school and study texts
and other instructive texts, and when reading other
systematically ordered sources, among others digital
sources
Arithmetic/math:
24. The students learn to solve practical and formal
mathematical problems and to clearly demonstrate their
reasoning
World and personal orientation:
Where possible, these learning objectives should be
combined with other learning objectives. For exam-
ple, consider [...], measuring and processing informa-
tion in, among other things, tables, timeline and charts
(arithmetics/math), [...], but in particular, (45.) stu-
dents learn to develop, design, implement/execute and
evaluate solutions to technical problems.
The learning objectives for grades 7–9 are summarized in
58 general core objectives describing goals for the Dutch and
English languages, arithmetic/math, man and nature, man
and society, arts and culture and movement and sports [79].
Similarly to primary school, ten of these objectives contain
some aspects of CT, for instance, as in the following:
Dutch language:
4. Students learn to apply strategies to acquire infor-
mation from spoken and written texts
5. Students learn to search for information in written
and digital sources, to order it and to assess its value
for themselves and others. The same objectives exist
for the English language.
Arithmetics and math
19. Students learn to use the appropriate mathemat-
ical language to organize their own thinking and for
explanations to others, and learns to understand the
mathematical language of others.
25. The students learn to use informal notation, schematic
representations, tables, charts and formulas to grasp
the relations among quantities and variables
27. The students learn to describe, order and visualize
data systematically, and they learn to critically assess
data, representations, and conclusion
Man and nature:
33. Students learn to acquire knowledge, through re-
search, about technical product and systems that are
relevant to them, they learn to evaluate this knowl-
edge and to systematically design and make a technical
product.
Informatics is an elective subject in grades 10–12 of HAVO
(senior general secondary education which spans grades 7–
11 and prepares students for higher professional education),
and VWO (pre-university education which spans grades 7–
12 and is geared towards further education at a university)
[64]. Prior to 2006, there was a dedicated course on IT
mostly focusing on learning to use Office-like applications
in grades 7-9. Since 2006 when the curriculum was revised,
schools may continue to offer this course or choose to offer
its contents integrated in other courses. No such course is
provided for primary education.
In elementary schools a teacher teaches all subjects, whereas
in grades 7–9, a teacher usually teaches one subject or a
cluster of related subjects. Regardless of which level they
teach, teacher education is at the higher professional level.
As there are no dedicated Informatics/ICT courses in K-9,
there is no dedicated teacher education either. Teachers and
students are, though, encouraged to make use of ICT tools
and equipment in their everyday work. The use of ICT in
education is quite widespread [120]. Only for the course of
Informatics in the higher grades is there a dedicated teacher
training in the form of an university master’s degree [62].
7
In 2012, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences published the report Digital Literacy in Secondary
Education - Skills and Attitudes for the 21st Century [82].
In it, a number of recommendations are made, among them:
• Introduce a new compulsory subject Information and
Communication in the lower years of HAVO and VWO.
This should be a broad and compact introductory sub-
ject, covering the essential facets of digital literacy.
• Encourage interaction between these subjects and other
school subjects.
• Make it a priority to raise a new generation of teachers
with new skills and attitudes.
Furthermore, in that report CT is considered to be an
integral part of digital literacy. The recommendations in the
report resulted in two initiatives: 1) to completely overhaul
the elective Informatics subject in the upper grades of HAVO
and VWO, and 2) to explore what is meant by the notion of
digital literacy, what aspects of it are desired in grades 7–9,
and what place this should have in the curriculum.
To answer these questions, the Netherlands Institute for
Curriculum Development is doing research into occurrences
of 21st century skills and digital literacy, including CT, in K-
9 in learning objectives and teaching materials and teaching
practices. Their preliminary findings indicate there is lim-
ited attention to digital literacy in learning objectives which
are described in rather general terms. Teaching materials for
K-6 scarcely include teaching these objectives and those for
grades 7 through 9 pay more attention to these objectives.
One instance of teaching CT was found in the textbooks
[124]. Furthermore, there is a Dutch research project on CT
focusing on finding an operational definition of the term, de-
vising an assessment instrument, and developing curricular
interventions [63].
4.2.5 Sweden
The current design of K-12 CS education in Swedish schools
was established in the 1970s, and named informatics, later
changed to information technology. The subject existed as
a supplementary subject in vocational education, and later
became obligatory for upper secondary students at natural
science programmes [111]. For a couple of years it was of-
fered at primary and lower secondary level, but was later
removed as primary and secondary teachers did not qualify
and specifically the programming part was hard for many
teachers to teach. Programming and system development
early on became an issue regarding teachers’ competencies.
Today CS has transformed into a subject mainly focusing
on digital literacy at primary and secondary level includ-
ing application and tools (e.g. the Office suite) for problem
solving in other subjects. However, there is no such subject
in compulsory school as CS. Instead the content is offered
in school subjects like Technology and Mathematics. At the
upper secondary level, CS education varies depending on the
programme you attend, focusing on natural sciences, tech-
nology, aesthetics or electricity. Teacher training in Sweden
does not offer courses in CS, making it is unusual to find
teachers offering the content in school. There are courses at
upper secondary school in programming, multimedia, web
design etc. that are offered to any student who wishes to
take them. However, programming courses are mainly at-
tended by students who attend one of the three programmes
in technology, natural sciences or electronics. Hence, only a
minority of students take programming courses.
The ICT content in the Swedish educational system is
summarized as follows:
• In the preschool curricula only one ICT-related goal
regarding desirable digital competence can be found:
“Multimedia and information technology can be used
in creative processes as well as in application.”
• Current compulsory school (grades one through nine)
ICT training focuses on orienting the students in “the
flow of information,” how to use digital technology,
and to develop critical thinking about the information
available on the Internet. Recently the government has
proposed a change in curriculum which focuses more
on digital competences.
• All youth in Sweden who have completed compulsory
school are entitled to a three-year upper secondary
school education (grades ten through twelve and thir-
teen). Currently, upper secondary school offers 18
programmes and 61 orientations; 12 programmes with
preparation for vocational work and 6 programmes for
further studies in humanities, social sciences, natu-
ral sciences, and technology. Year thirteen is offered
only in technology programme, for specialisation in one
of four orientations. In upper secondary school CS
courses are elective for all students. IT-related courses
are mandatory in few of the 18 programmes offered in-
cluding the Technology Programme and the Electric-
ity and Energy Programme. Optional programming
courses are available in all programmes, but only a
limited number of students take up computer program-
ming in school.
There are voluntary initiatives (see Section 4.3 below)
and unofficial groups (e.g. TeacherHack, Framtidens Språk),
which work on hacking current curricula, developing new
programs, and inspiring teachers to include more CT in the
classroom. Teacher communities use social media (Twitter
and Facebook) to share material, ideas and spread the word
of how the national curriculum could be extended with the
help of things like programming. In addition, ideas from
the maker movement inspire teachers to turn pupils into
creators instead of mere consumers of ICT. Programming is
used to integrate CT in subjects such as Carpentry (Swedish:
Slöjd), Swedish language and Technology, with activities like
the ones listed in Section 6.1. The Swedish National Agency
of Education has approved this somewhat different interpre-
tation of the curriculum, as long as it fulfills the learning
objectives.
In 2012, the Swedish government established the Commit-
tee for Digitization (Swedish: Digitaliseringskommisionen)
to give some guidelines for future work on digitizing the
Swedish society. The committee recently published a report
[43], which pinpoints the need in school to embrace the con-
cept of digital competency, in line with the recommendations
from the EU. The report explicitly highlights the need for
including programming in the curriculum as part of already
existing subjects. The outcome of the committee’s work will
presumably serve as guidelines when developing future cur-
ricula, and is therefore of great interest to follow.
8
4.2.6 United States
In the United States the control of and responsibility for
education rests primarily with the state and local govern-
ment, which means that the curriculum varies significantly
across the country. A recent step in the direction of national
standardization was the creation of the Common Core Stan-
dards, which were developed through a state-led process and
launched in 2009. The standards have been adopted by 44
states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the De-
partment of Defense Education Activity. The Common Core
has two sets of standards that extend throughout the entire
K-12 curriculum, one for English language arts/literacy and
one for mathematics. There are also a separate set of stan-
dards for grades six through twelve that cover literacy in
history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.
The Common Core includes multiple standards for com-
puter literacy, mostly in the English Language Arts area.
For example, the following are some of the literacy topics
found in the standard:
• Anchor standards for reading: Integrate and evaluate
content presented in diverse media and formats, in-
cluding visually and quantitatively
• Anchor standards for writing: Use technology, includ-
ing the Internet, to produce and publish writing and
to interact and collaborate with others.
• Anchor standards for writing: Gather relevant infor-
mation from multiple print and digital sources, assess
the credibility and accuracy of each source, and inte-
grate the information while avoiding plagiarism
There are also some topics in each of the areas that can be
taught with a CT focus, although CT is not the main goal
of the standard. For example, the following are some of the
competencies that could be taught with a CT approach:
• Measurement and data: Represent and interpret data
(grade two): Draw a picture graph and a bar graph
(with single-unit scale) to represent a data set with
up to four categories. Solve simple put-together, take-
apart, and compare problems using information pre-
sented in a bar graph.
• Expressions and equations: Use properties of opera-
tions to generate equivalent expressions (grade seven):
Understand that rewriting an expression in different
forms in a problem context can shed light on the prob-
lem and how the quantities in it are related.
There are few places in the U.S. where CS is required for
students. At best, high school (grades nine–twelve) students
have the option of taking electives in technology or, in some
places, taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science
course which is currently a Java programming class. The CS
AP course allows students to take a standardized test, which
if they pass, provides them with college credit. Typically
students only take CS if it counts for graduation, and there
are (as of December 2014) only 25 states in which CS applies
to graduation requirements. Which requirement CS counts
for depends on the state, but the current areas are math,
science, math and science, math or science, and math and
other. Much of the push to have CS count for graduation
has been led by the Computer Science Teachers Association
(CSTA) and more recently Code.org.
 Predating the push for CS to count for high school grad-
uation, there was a significant effort made on the part of
multiple organizations and individuals to provide CS op-
tions for high school students that take a broader approach
to CS. An alternative AP course called Computer Science
Principles has been developed, designed to appeal to stu-
dents who may not be interested in programming, and it
includes topics such as abstraction, big data and informa-
tion, algorithms, and the Internet. The CS Principles AP
exam is tentatively scheduled to be offered for the first time
in May 2016.
There is no evidence that any elementary or middle school
requires CS courses for graduation. Code.org, the CSTA,
and CS education researchers have been working to change
the situation, both by developing curricular materials and
by doing teacher training.
Teachers in the U.S. must possess a bachelor’s degree (a
4-year university degree) and must earn a state-issued cer-
tification or license. Some states also require elementary
school teachers to major in a content area, such as math or
science. They typically enroll in a university teacher prepa-
ration program and take classes in education and child psy-
chology in addition to those required by their major. Note
that teachers in private schools do not need to meet state
requirements, such as certifications or licenses.
In 2007 the CSTA gathered information about certifica-
tions and endorsements for CS teachers across the 50 states.
Forty-seven states returned replies for a response rate of
88%. When asked if they grant a CS endorsement, only
53% of states indicated that they do. However, the responses
indicated that 29% do require a CS endorsement at the sec-
ondary level, 27% require it at the middle school level, 13%
require it at the elementary school level, and 13% require
it overall in the K-12 level. Teachers in some states would
be allowed to teach CS courses using other certifications,
including math, educational technology, technology and de-
sign, and business/library media.
The gap between the availability of teacher certifications
or endorsements and the requirement that teachers possess
certifications or endorsements to teach CS subjects is of
great concern in the U.S. The National Science Foundation
has for several years funded projects that focus on teacher
development for CS under the CS 10K program, which is
currently a part of the STEM-C Partnerships program. The
goal of the program is to develop 10,000 CS teachers in the
American school system.
4.2.7 Summary
The overview of the situation in different countries above
shows that the inclusion of CT aspects in the curriculum is
relevant in all countries. In rare cases, programming-related
outcomes are mentioned explicitly. By looking at the learn-
ing objectives through a CT-lens, one can also find objec-
tives in various subjects which could be places where CT
concepts would be taught.
It is also interesting to compare the above picture with the
state of CS education in other countries as described in the
special issue of the Transactions on Computing Education:
‘Perspectives and Visions of Computer Science Education
in Primary and Secondary (K-12) Schools’. In particular,
as the monograph editors conclude, “[d]espite the apparent
differences, there are several topics that are addressed by the
majority of [the] articles. First, proper teacher education in
9
substantial extent and depth seems to be one of the most
critical factors for the success of rigorous CS education on
the one hand and also one of the hardest goals to achieve
on the other. Second, there is a convergence towards CT
as a core idea of the K-12 curricula. Third, programming in
one form or another, seems to be absolutely necessary for a
future oriented CSE” [71] (added emphasis).
4.3 Introducing CT through informal initia-
tives
In addition to the official and formal ways listed in the
previous section, many children also encounter CT through
events and activities that are not formally associated with
their educational institutions. These include clubs, con-
tests, outreach events, and activities organized by individual
teachers and organizations. In some cases outside organiza-
tions develop activities or curricula designed to be used by
teachers looking for activities to supplement what they do
in the classroom. Here we discuss some of the informal ac-
tivities that have been used to introduce CT to children
in grades K-9 throughout the world. The list of activities
should not be assumed to be comprehensive, since such a list
is beyond the scope of this report. It is also worth pointing
out that most of these focus on a given set of CT abilities
(e.g. algorithms through programming), and do not nec-
essarily provide students with the opportunity to learn the
entire CT skill set to an equal extent.
4.3.1 Clubs
Clubs are becoming increasingly popular, in particular
those focusing on programming. Two club concepts that
have spread to a large number of countries in a short time
are CoderDojo [24] and Code Club [22]. Both clubs are of-
fered free-of-charge to children and young people and are es-
tablished, run and led by volunteers. As of July 2014, there
were 443 CoderDojos in 46 countries worldwide and 2562
CodeClubs. The main goal of these clubs is to introduce
children to programming in a friendly, motivating, and no-
strings-attached way. Code Club also provides ready-made
project material, which has been translated into several lan-
guages. Makerspaces [97] focus more on ”making” aspects,
but are still good examples of how working in creative ways
can help introduce students to CT related skills and con-
cepts.
In addition to non-profit organisations, companies are also
launching similar initiatives. As an example, Google started
its “Google CS First” program [61] in early 2014, provid-
ing after-school material that can be used by volunteers. In
June 2014, Google launched “Made with code” [95], a pro-
gram aimed at getting girls and young women excited about
coding and closing the gender gap in IT.
In addition to these international large-scale initiatives,
there are also equivalent local ones. For instance in Sweden,
the non-profit organisation Kodcentrum (Code centre, [84])
aims at opening locations throughout the country where kids
can come on a regular basis to learn about programming
with the help of volunteers. Similarly, in addition to gen-
eral clubs and programs in Sweden, there are several ones
that are particularly aimed at underrepresented groups, for
instance Geek Girl Mini for girls.
4.3.2 Contests
Several types of programming contests are arranged for
students of different ages throughout the world. Whereas
olympiads (such as the International Olympiads in Infor-
matics [72]), are aimed at talented students, the goal of
other contests is to introduce CS and CT in a motivat-
ing way to students at a larger scale. Some examples are
RoboCup Junior [110], which is a project-based educational
initiative aimed at introducing programming to children us-
ing robotics. The Italian Ministry of Education supports a
problem-solving olympiad focusing on informatics and algo-
rithmic thinking in compulsory education [104]. The aim
of this contest is to promote a scientific perspective about
informatics starting from the earliest school years, with a
particular emphasis on “methodology, helpful to formalize
and solve problems arising in every field” [19]. Students
take part in the olympiads in teams, which have to have
member of both genders. In addition to training activities,
the olympiads involve a final test, followed by two rounds of
competitive contests (both regional and national). Teach-
ers are involved throughout the olympiads and get access
to all solutions including comments after the contest, which
makes it possible to go deeper into the concepts covered in
the problems.
A more general contest is Bebras, which was introduced in
Lithuania in 2004, and has since spread to over 30 countries
throughout the world [7]. In 2013, almost 0.8 million stu-
dents aged 8-18 took part in the contest. The main goals of
Bebras are to raise students’ awareness of CS and CT and
evoke interest in the field through a set of inspiring tasks
adapted to different age groups. The Bebras contest is ar-
ranged annually in local languages throughout the world.
The tasks are developed collaboratively during an annual
workshop, after which each country selects their own task
set to translate and use in the local contest. Focus is put on
problem-solving activities which do not require any previous
knowledge, and each task is categorized as belonging to one
or several of the following groups [35]: information com-
prehension; algorithmic thinking; computer system usage;
structures, patterns and arrangements; puzzles and games;
and ICT and society. All tasks are accompanied with an ex-
planation for how a given task was to be solved and a part
called “It’s informatics”, which provides both teachers and
students with some additional information on how a given
task is related to CS or CT. Hence, teachers can use interest-
ing tasks from previous contests to work with CT together
with their students. Another similar contest, closely related
to Bebras, is the Informatics Kangaroo in Italy [76], which
is aimed at students in grades 6–13.
4.3.3 Outreach programs
Different organizations, both large-scale and local ones,
arrange outreach programs aimed at introducing CT to chil-
dren and young people. Among these, CS Unplugged [9] and
CS4FN [33], are worth particular mention. In addition, uni-
versities and private companies arrange holiday camps and
various events aimed at both children and their parents. The
Hour of Code, an outreach event organized by Code.org dur-
ing the Computer Science Education Week in 2013, received
a great deal of attention, and spread to other countries as
well. As of July 2014, nearly 40 million people have writ-
ten some lines of code using the Hour of Code. In October
2014, the EU is arranging the European CodeWeek for the
first time, with the intent of having people throughout Eu-
rope arranging events related to programming. In addition
10
to these there is also a range of individual initiatives, where
evangelists and other persons passionate about CT at school
launch programs, which can be more or less local.
4.3.4 Discussion
There are many positives to these informal activities. The
people who organize and participate in them are typically
passionate about bringing CS to children. Often the orga-
nizers have significant training in the topic around which the
event or activity is focused. Many times the activities at-
tract the attention of the media and/or parents of children,
improving the potential impact.
The activities also have their drawbacks. Typically they
are not integrated into the curriculum in the schools, which
does not allow the children to see the connections between
the CT-related material and the subjects that they are re-
quired to learn at school. There is little consensus on what
should be taught in the informal activities nor on the peda-
gogy upon which the activities are based. The activities may
or may not involve the teachers, and when teachers are not
involved it does not allow further development of the ideas.
The activities also include a strong focus on programming,
which may have some downsides discussed earlier in this
section.
4.4 Curricular initiatives
One of the first steps to integrating CT into a curriculum
is to suggest how teachers could begin using CT to meet
existing curricular requirements. In this section we highlight
a few curricular initiatives to provide some examples of such
work. It should be noted that many other countries, both
within Europe [51] as well as elsewhere (e.g. New Zealand),
have made significant contributions to addressing CT in the
curriculum. For the purposes of brevity we choose to review
a couple of examples from Europe and the U.S.
A country that has made significant progress in develop-
ing and disseminating CS curricular standards is the UK. As
part of a now-successful effort to include the subject com-
puting in the English national curriculum, the Computing
at School [26] project has developed a guide entitled “Com-
puting in the national curriculum: A guide for secondary
teachers.” Developed as a part of an initially informal and
grassroots collaboration between K-12 teachers, IT profes-
sionals, and university academics, the guide discusses the
programme of study that will be required in English sec-
ondary schools beginning in September 2014 and gives sup-
port for planning, teaching, and assessing computing. In
order to ensure a smooth implementation of the required
curriculum, the Computing at School project also has a cer-
tification program which is discussed in more detail in Sec-
tion 6.4 addressing teacher training below.
In an attempt to proactively influence curricular devel-
opments in countries other than the UK, several private
organizations and companies have worked to develop cur-
ricular materials that make it easier for teachers interested
in introducing CT into their classrooms. The organizations
include, for instance, the CSTA, the ISTE, Code.org, and
Google. University academics working in conjunction with
K-12 educators have also worked to develop curricular ma-
terials, most notably the Exploring CS project [53]. The
Exploring CS project has a significant professional develop-
ment component, so that the discussion of that project is
postponed for a later section focusing on teacher develop-
ment. Some information about the contributions of each of
the other organizations is given below.
The CSTA was founded in 2004 and is a “membership or-
ganization that supports and promotes the teaching of CS
and other computing disciplines” [31]. The CSTA focuses on
teachers and offers curricular standards and sample teach-
ing materials. One set of materials available is the CS Prin-
ciples: Computation in Action curriculum package which
includes lesson plans, activities, assessments, and projects
with solutions. The CSTA has taken a broad approach to
CS and has been involved in the development of CT ma-
terials for teachers. The organization has made available
CT Teacher Resources, which is a package of prototype ma-
terials including an operational definition of CT for K-12
Education, a CT vocabulary and progression chart, nine
CT Learning Experiences, and CT classroom scenarios. The
CSTA also has a CT Leadership Toolkit which complements
the CT Teacher Resources and includes a document that
can be used to make the case for teaching CT, resources
for creating systemic change in K-12 institutions, and an
Implementing Strategies Guide. The CSTA also supports
local chapters, which are an important support system for
CS teachers, especially in the U.S.
Working both independently and in conjunction with the
CSTA, the International Society for Technology in Educa-
tion [73] is a non-profit organization serving educators. It
is a global organization that has developed standards for
students, teachers, and administrators among others. The
ISTE has worked with the CSTA to develop the Compu-
tational Thinking Toolkit. They also have multimedia pre-
sentations on CT to be used for an elementary school level
audience and one for middle- or high-school audience, and
presenter instructions.
Founded in 2013, Code.org [23] has made tremendous
progress in that time in raising awareness about the lack
of CS education, especially in the United States. The staff
and volunteers at Code.org have worked to bring CS into
the K-9 classroom by developing materials for teachers to
use with their students. Beginning in the summer of 2014,
Code.org will have three levels of CS courses for the elemen-
tary school. The first course is on for early-readers, ages
4-6, the second is for beginners, ages 6+, and the third is for
more experienced students ages 6+. The courses will blend
online, self-guided, and self-paced tutorials with unplugged
activities. Each level consists of about 20 lessons that may
be implemented as one contiguous unit or one lesson a week
for a semester. The courses have been designed for students
of all ages, but they reinforce math, science, and English ed-
ucation standards for elementary school students. Code.org
also has a K-8 introduction to CS curriculum which is a
20-hour course introducing core CS and programming con-
cepts. As suggested by its name, the curriculum contains a
lot of material on writing programs, but there are unplugged
activities and CT-focused activities too.
As part of their Exploring Computational Thinking re-
sources [52], Google has put together a page of classroom-
ready lessons, examples, and programs for K-12 educators.
The sources for the materials are typically not researchers
associated with Google, and the credit for each is provided
as a part of the document. The materials are classified ac-
cording to grade level, subject (including math, language,
and science), and when applicable each is provided a label
that indicates the Common Core Curriculum or other (U.S.)
11
standard that it meets. There are a large variety of subjects
and types of problems represented in the materials.
Funding for teacher workshops can also be acquired from
industry, for example, through the Google CS4HS program
[30, 11].
5. TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCE OF CT
In order to collect empirical data on the current situation
with regard to teaching activities with promising potential
for introducing CT, we developed a questionnaire addressed
at K-9 teachers. In this section we discuss the results from
the questionnaire.
5.1 Data collection and analysis
Although CT might not be explicitly mentioned in official
documents, such as core curricula or covered in textbooks
used at schools, this does not mean that abilities relevant to
CT are not covered in the classrooms. In order to reveal to
what extent and how teachers already use activities with sig-
nificant potential for introducing CT, we developed an online
questionnaire which was translated into six languages and
distributed to teachers in Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden
and the Netherlands through social media, direct contact to
local head masters, and email lists.
The questionnaire included eight questions (see Appendix),
out of which one was open-ended and the rest were multiple-
choice. The goal of the questionnaire was threefold: 1)
gather information on teachers’ perceptions of the nine CT
aspects described by the CSTA/ISTE (data collection, data
analysis, data representation, problem decomposition, ab-
straction, algorithms, automation, simulation and paralleliza-
tion), 2) reveal to what extent teachers see themselves work-
ing with these aspects in their classrooms, and 3) collect
examples on how this is accomplished. In addition to in-
cluding the nine aspects in the questionnaire, we also briefly
described each aspect in free form to provide some guidance
to the respondents.
The data collected from the multiple-choice questions were
analysed using basic statistical methods as well as cluster
analysis. The answers to the open-ended questions were
read and collaboratively categorized by the authors accord-
ing to whether a given answer should be considered as CT
or something else (e.g. computer literacy).
5.2 Demographics
We received 961 responses, with the main part coming
from Italian and Lithuanian K-9 teachers (Table 1). The
time for sending out the questionnaire was somewhat prob-
lematic in Finland and Sweden, as teachers were just about
to leave for their summer holiday.
Country Number of responses % male % female
Finland 79 27 73
Italy 283 28 70
Lithuania 551 16 83
Netherlands 17 47 53
Sweden 33 19 81
Total 961 21 78
Table 1: Number of survey responses per country.
Some teachers chose not to specify their gender, re-
sulting in the percentages not always adding to 100.
 Figure 1: How teachers perceive their activities in relation to CT concepts.

Almost two thirds of the respondents (63%) were between

30-50 years old, one third (32%) older than 50 years and only
6% were younger than 30 years. The teaching background
also varied, from only a few having taught less than five
years (8%), 15% having taught 5-10 years, 36% 10-20 years
and finally 42% having a teaching background over 20 years.
Several subjects were represented among the teachers. In
the questionnaire they had to tick which of the subjects
listed in Table 2 they taught.

Subject % teachers
Information technology 41
Mathematics 38
Natural Science 22 Figure 2: The clusters extracted from data.
Mother language 17
Foreign language 10
We also asked teachers what tools, applications or soft-
History 10
ware — if any — they use when working with these CT
Geography 10
concepts in the classroom. The resulting data is illustrated
Gymnastics 8
by the chart in Figure 3. Other types of technology, such
Arts 8
as interactive whiteboards including related applications, as
Technology 7
well as different types of specialized software (e.g. Geoge-
Music 7
bra) and hardware (e.g. iPad) were also mentioned.
Crafts 6
The tools used reflect the same situation as the clusters
Environmental 5
above — web resources and production tools are commonly
Religion 3
used for collecting, analysing and representing data, whereas
Health 2
the other tools are more seldomly used as they involve, for
Other 14
example, programming or simulations.
We offered teachers the opportunity to give us their email
Table 2: Percentage of teachers (n=961) involved in
address if they were interested in receiving the final report.
different subjects. Most teachers stated that they
Over a third (35%) of all teachers provided their email ad-
teach more than one subject.
dresses, indicating that there is quite a bit of interest in
these questions among teachers in grades 1–9.
In the following, we present our findings from analysing Over half of the teachers (52%) responded to the open-
the survey data. ended question asking for two examples of instances when
they had felt successful incorporating some of the nine CT
5.3 Findings aspects in their teaching. The examples gave us some in-
As Figure 1 shows, teachers reported on using the CT sight into what teachers consider to be CT and how well
concepts related to data (collection, analysis and represen- their thoughts correspond to our own view of CT. In the
tation) in their teaching to the highest extent. A clus- following, we will present a selection of the more creative
ter analysis revealed that these three make up one cluster, examples teachers mentioned for introducing different CT
whereas problem decomposition, algorithms and abstraction aspects in the classroom. The activities were selected by
form another, and finally simulation, automation and paral- the authors through a collaborative evaluation of the survey
lelization form a third cluster (Figure 2). data aiming at revealing unconventional ways of introducing

12
Figure 3: Technology used by teachers when working with CT concepts in the classroom. The percentages
represent the proportion of teachers reporting on using the respective tool or software.
CT in education or those enriching and motivating activi-
ties that are already present at school. The quotes provided
below were freely translated to English by the authors.
Data collection, analysis and representation
These CT concepts deal with gathering appropriate infor-
mation and selecting relevant information; making sense of
data, finding patterns, drawing conclusions; and organizing
and depicting data in appropriate graphs, charts, words, im-
ages, tables, etc.
Deciding whether a data collection activity should be in-
terpreted as CT or more as something that supports the
development of digital literacy turned out to be quite a
challenge. Considering the amount of information available
online, most teachers likely ask their students to look up
information on the web. In our opinion collection has to go
together with analysis and/or representation in order to be
an example of a CT activity.
“Practiced evaluation of sources with my stu-
dents where they, based on given statements, were
to look for information that confirm or deny the
statements. After that, we discussed what stu-
dents had found and the sources they had used.”
(collection and analysis)
The quote above is an example of how analyzing and eval-
uating information makes a collection task much more inter-
esting. Similarly, the following activity is interesting as the
teacher explicitly mentions that students explore different
ways of representing the information they have found.
“Students make a questionnaire for the rest of the
class about a topic that interests them, input the
class results in Excel and try out different charts,
in order to find the best alternative for telling
the story of the given data.” (data collection and
representation)
Teachers also mentioned activities that involved all three
data-related activities:
“Selecting relevant data occurs regularly in so
called ‘word problems’. If appropriate, I have
13
students organize the data in an overview or in a
sketch.” (data collection, analysis and represen-
tation)
“. . . in the 6th grade I integrate math with IT:
the students gather statistics, then process them
using MS Excel by creating frequency tables that
display the data using histograms.”
The following simple but rather creative example comes
from a teacher working with children in kindergarten:
“With kids we invent iconic representations (where
the icons are drawing) of the weather, stick them
on a timeline (day-by-day), then analyze the data
in terms of ‘more often’/‘less often’ during the
month.” (data collection, analysis and represen-
tation)
Collaborative projects were also mentioned, involving look-
ing up relevant data, condensing it in an online document
to collaboratively create a script for a movie.
“When students create documentary films on the
theme of environmental problems. The whole
process contained both planning/structuring, col-
lecting information/data and various techniques
for presentation. The students worked in groups
where, for instance, a Google document tied to-
gether the various activities and members of the
group while they were in different places.”
Another activity mentioned in this context involved analy-
sis of lyrics to find recurrent patterns (e.g. background met-
ric rhythm) and variants introduced by the poet; analysis
from the phonological, structural and metaphorical perspec-
tives. Some teachers also mentioned letting students work
with real-life data, such as collecting information about and
analyzing sleep patterns of students in class.
Problem decomposition
Breaking down tasks into smaller manageable parts and
merging subtasks is common to many subjects.
 “Problem-solving skills should be developed in all
subjects, both individually and in an integrated
way. We use the common structure — under-
standing the problem, decomposing the problem,
simplification of the problem, raising questions
about the problem, finding answers (via a search
or experiment), and a summary of the presenta-
tion. For IT subjects I emphasize CT and infor-
mation literacy including data acquisition, man-
agement, information extraction, and communi-
cation. I use technology as a tool for solving
real-life problems, usually connected with other
subjects.”
Algorithms
Despite the fact that algorithms were part of the cluster of
concepts that was not very commonly used by teachers, we
found surprisingly many inspiring activities related to plan-
ning and organizing sequences of steps in order to solve a
problem. This suggests that those who do introduce pro-
gramming in their teaching actually are explicitly thinking
about and planning the ways in which this is done, and hence
also have rather nice examples to share.
“We work with different problems when building
small programmable robots for different types of
tasks such as cleaning, recycling and rescue or
playing soccer. In these challenges we have to
solve problems, where you first look for informa-
tion and have to choose the correct/important
data, where you need to interpret data in dif-
ferent formats in, for instance, different graphs,
where we have to split the problem into smaller
pieces in order to be able to move forward with
the solution, where we have to move backwards
in the solution process in order to approach the
solution in another way, where we need to test so-
lutions in pieces and bring together solutions that
work.” (also covers data collection, data analysis,
problem decomposition, automation)
Teachers also recognized that algorithms can be found in
non-traditional subjects such as in domestic sciences:
“We do that all the time when using recipes.”
and languages:
“Understanding the structure of a sentence, iden-
tifying subjects and objects first in order to be
able to use the correct form for, for instance, an
adjective or the correct relational pronoun, etc. I
don’t know if this can be called a CT skill, but at
least it is a way of solving a task step-by-step.”
In addition, teachers mentioned projects where program-
ming had been used for cross-curricular and general tasks:
“We designed and implemented Scratch activities
with common goals: for example to be used as
interactive sets for stage performances at school
(such as the one organized at the end of the
year).”
“In the 6th grade we use Imagine Logo for creat-
ing various projects, which children really like.”
14
Teachers also recognized problem solving and puzzles as
involving algorithms, for instance when using a gradual ap-
proach to solve maze problems, starting from easy tasks
where the maze is known in advance and ending up with
more general strategies.
Abstraction
We did not find much related to reducing complexity to de-
fine the main idea, finding characteristics, and creating mod-
els in teachers’ responses. One teacher did however mention
using different representations for the same thing, hence ab-
stracting away the meaning from the symbols used:
“Conversions between number representations us-
ing different alphabets and bases.”
Simulation
Only a few teachers mentioned using or creating simula-
tions, for example, for running experiments together with
the students. This was quite surprising given the number of
different kinds of tools available for these kinds of activities.
Here is an interesting unplugged example:
“Simulation of genetic-drift phenomena for small
populations through random extraction of coloured
tokens which represent different genetic features.”
Automation
Very few teachers mentioned examples related to automa-
tion, that is recognizing ways in which technology can help
us accomplish tasks that would otherwise be too repetitive,
infeasible or difficult. Some had, however, used spreadsheet
software for this purpose:
“Creating macros and spreadsheets in order to
automate and simplify repetitive tasks.” (pri-
mary school)
“Using spreadsheets in order to automate data
processing.”
Parallelization
Most examples mentioned in the data related to paralleliza-
tion dealt with students working in parallel on solving a
problem or a common project.
“Students are working to solve problems. They
divide the tasks among each other so that they
can work in parallel.”
On the other hand, students are automatically dealing
with parallelization when for instance working with Scratch,
where the different scripts are running in parallel. As this
happens totally behind the scenes, students and teachers
may not be aware of it, unless it is explicitly pointed out.
5.4 Discussion
The goal of our questionnaire was to explore their cur-
rent perception of some concepts and the potential for in-
troducing these concepts in K-9 education. Teachers were
asked to indicate how frequently they use different types of
CT-related activities, such as data collection, data repre-
sentation, etc. in their teaching. The responses naturally
correspond to the respective teacher’s subjective perception
both of their classroom activities and of the descriptions pro-
vided for the CT abilities. The quotes were included to give
an idea of the kinds of (interesting) activities with potential
for introducing CT, not to convince that the teachers are
aware of CT. Getting at teachers’ true understanding of a
subject requires a study over time including in-depth inter-
views. An effort in that direction is being undertaken by one
of the authors [63], who is currently interviewing informat-
ics teachers to establish their pedagogical content knowledge
[96] pertaining to a limited number of CT aspects through
semi-structured interviews based on the CoRe instrument
[93].
The teachers in our questionnaire represented a large num-
ber of different subjects, although the large majority of re-
spondents were teaching ICT, mathematics, and/or some
other natural science. The results should be interpreted with
this background in mind, as there is a chance that the re-
sults are somewhat biased towards illustrating the situation
among STEM teachers.
Many of the examples provided by the teachers contained
too little detail for us to determine whether an activity sup-
ported CT or maybe was more aimed at, for instance, de-
veloping digital literacy. As such, some of them may only
be marginally interesting from a CT perspective. To clarify
this, we would need to conduct follow-up interviews. Nev-
ertheless, we believe that already the results presented here
can be considered a valuable contribution to the discussion
on CT in lower levels of education. To the best of our
knowledge, a multinational investigation similar to this one
of teachers’ current practices and their perceptions of CT
concepts has never been done before.
6. INTEGRATING CT IN EDUCATION
In this section, we present some sample activities and les-
son plans highlighting how CT can be used in a range of sub-
jects. The activities are not to be interpreted as ready-made
teaching material, but rather as examples of the breadth of
CT in education. Although many are related to program-
ming, there are also many examples that go beyond the ob-
vious. We start with shorter activities and then move into
longer and more extensive activities. After that, we intro-
duce examples of ways in which teacher training is and can
be arranged.
6.1 Discussion of possible activities
In this subsection we discuss a few interesting types of ac-
tivities aimed at fostering the CT skills of young students.
Before introducing them, we try to provide a coarse charac-
terization of what is specific to CT in the — otherwise quite
general — CSTA/ISTE categories mentioned in section 2.
To schematize a little, we can recognize three broad areas.
From a computational perspective, data collection, repre-
sentation and analysis are about the distinctions and the re-
lationships between information and symbolic data: data vs.
information; conventionality (arbitrariness) of codes; univer-
sality of codes (e.g. of binary codes); amenability to for-
mal manipulation — which is the basis for automated data
processing. The scope of this area is nicely condensed into
Duchâteau’s statement: “informatics is an unceasing quest
to disclose the meaning hidden in a form, as well as an en-
deavor to bind our intended meaning to some form” [46].
(The author then adds: “No one should leave school with-
out at least some appreciation of this about informatics.”)
15
The focus of problem decomposition, algorithms, abstrac-
tion and parallelization is on (non-trivial) information pro-
cessing tasks: how we approach information-related prob-
lems and what kind of solutions we are looking for. This
requires, for instance: mappings between (data vs. infor-
mation) transformations; introspection (metacognition) and
verbalization of solution strategies; (re)formulation in terms
of rules; organizational work; mastery of complexity.
Finally, automation and simulation are concerned with
orientation (in the sense of [45], where the term is intro-
duced to mean what programming is for), i.e. why we carry
out computations. In this respect, automation is aimed at
delegating boring information-related tasks to a machine,
at avoiding errors in routine work, at speeding-up process-
ing. Simulations, on the other hand, are created to acquire
new knowledge; to anticipate trends (based on the acquired
knowledge, e.g. to forecast) and so on.
Unplugged and kinesthetic activities
CT can be introduced in the classroom using software and
hardware, but technology is not required. In fact, a vari-
ety of kid-friendly activities proposed in projects such as
CS Unplugged [9], CS4FN [34], Informatik erLeben [99] and
Abenteuer Informatik [58] are based on the belief that valu-
able educational objectives relevant to CS can be achieved
without using a computer. These activities have been em-
braced by a variety of educators, for example, as described
in Curzon’s recent keynote address [32]. The activities can
easily be combined, as seen by the fact that Curzon mentions
a mix of CS Unplugged, CS4FN, and CT in his keynote.
The CS Unplugged site provides approximately two dozen
activities highlighting concepts behind a variety of CS con-
cepts, including information theory, searching and sorting
algorithms, graph problems such as minimal spanning trees
and graph colouring, cryptography, and computer architec-
ture. All of the activities are available in at least a half
a dozen languages and many of the activities have imple-
mentations in Scratch or other simplified programming en-
vironments. Some activities have videos that show demon-
strations, and in some cases the activities are categorized,
for example with respect to the ACM K-12 curricular stan-
dards, New Zealand’s curricular standards, and Denning’s
Great Principles of Computing. To illustrate the flavor of
the activities, we briefly describe two here:
• Information theory: Twenty questions. In this
activity participants begin to understand how to clas-
sify the amount of information represented in a given
text, for example, by understanding how you might in-
dicate that a 1000-page telephone book contains more
information than 1000 blank sheets of paper. The ac-
tivity is recommended for participants aged 10 and up.
The first exercise asks the moderator to discuss what
participants think information is. After this, the con-
cept of surprising information is discussed. The spe-
cific example given is that it would be easy to guess if
a classmate had walked to school but difficult to guess
that a classmate had ridden a rocket to school. The
more difficult concept is the one that requires more
information to represent. A concrete activity to il-
lustrate this is the last part in which participants are
asked to guess a number between 1 and 100. The op-
timal strategy for this game is mentioned and the idea
that increasing the interval by a factor of 10 only re-
 quires three additional questions is discussed.
• Image representation: Colour by Numbers. In
this activity participants understand that computers
represent drawings, photographs, and other pictures
only using numbers and demonstrates how this can
be done. It is recommended for participants aged 7
and up. The activity begins with a discussion of the
purpose of fax machines, when computers would need
to store pictures, and that computers only represent
information using numbers. The activity then demon-
strates that computer screens are divided in a grid of
pixels by showing how a lowercase “a” could be drawn
onto a grid using rows of black and white dots and
then using numbers to represent the places in each
row where the black dots are located. The activity
continues by asking participants to translate a row of
numbers into black dots to draw a picture and then
to design their own picture to be turned into a row of
numbers representing black dots.
Kinesthetic activities are those which do not require the
use of pen and paper and instead focus on making partici-
pants move around while participating (see e.g. [131]). Such
activities are broader than CS Unplugged, although several
CS Unplugged activities can be adapted into kinesthetic
activities. For example, sorting algorithms can be imple-
mented by participants physically holding the numbers to
be sorted and being allowed to compare their number to
other participants’ numbers using the rules imposed by the
sorting algorithm in question. Kinesthetic activities are pop-
ular for younger children, although the learning benefits of
using such activities are controversial.
Cross-disciplinary projects
The use of information technology artifacts is widespread
in all the subjects, but students (and teachers) are often
hardly aware of the underlying processing as well as of the
related implications for a critical evaluation of the outcomes
they can achieve. From a CT perspective “the power of
computing relies on the opportunity to have a machine do
some processing” for us whereas, as Bruillard (2006) points
out (as translated from the original French by the authors
of this paper), “the illusion of doing directly is definitely a
significant obstacle to the mastery as well as to the under-
standing of the potential of computers” [16]. This is a major
reason why it is important to have CT-oriented activities
across the disciplines.
In general, in order to induce a more mindful attitude
toward the CS sphere, while working on other subjects, a
list of guidelines may include the following:
• Care about the process, not (just) the final product.
• Whatever you intend to do, start from a careful design.
• The interpretation of output data is only trustworthy
as far as you are mindful of the underlying data pro-
cessing.
• Beware of the tools that give the illusion of operating
directly at the level of meaning; if possible, figure out
unusual representations that force you to distinguish
(and to create mappings) between form and meaning.
16
• Build upon few basic tools: what’s important are the
organization abilities; try restricting the available tools
to the most elementary functions.
• Make your procedures explicit in every detail, avoid
ambiguity and verbalize the intended processing.
• Plan carefully before carrying out a procedure: try to
anticipate all possible developments; as far as possible,
avoid proceeding by trial-and-error.
Some suggestions to stimulate pupils’ creativity within
a multidisciplinary setting can be found, for instance, in
[115, 133]. In particular, in order to promote “a more natu-
ral integration of informatics with other school disciplines,”
Sendova (2006) figures out “a set of scenarios for putting in-
formatics tools in the context of mathematics, art, and liter-
ature” [115]. Moreover, Lu and Fletcher [94] mention a va-
riety of contexts where CT topics can be introduced, essen-
tially at a basic language level, in different subjects as well
as in cross-disciplinary projects: while carrying out arith-
metic operations or finding square roots (mathematics), test-
ing reading comprehension (mother language), charting in-
formation (science), simulating/dramatizing assembly lines
(history and social studies), diagramming sentences through
syntax trees (mother/foreign languages), designing travel
brochures and organizing teamwork (interdisciplinary).
Finally, we mention two concrete examples of the use of
CT for covering mathematical concepts in a constructive
way:
• An example for middle school, described in [3] is the
“think of a number and I will tell you which it is” ac-
tivity where a popular riddle (“think of a number, add
something, multiply with something else, tell me the
number you have now and I can say which number you
started with”) is to be played by two Scratch actors or
between a Scratch actor and the student using the pro-
gram. Students learn that the steps of the riddle can
be used to compose a linear equation, where the vari-
able is the original number thought of at the beginning.
This hence makes it possible to experiment with how
an activity can be modeled by an equation, an uncom-
mon experience in middle school where equations are
normally introduced as a formal exercise having few
connections with the reality.
• A similar experience comes from trying to find how
long the path covered by a small robot is. If the robot
is mounted with sensors and the program moving the
robot uses them, the path covered during each run
can change and have a different length. Students then
realize that the path can be specified with an expres-
sion containing variables. This analysis associating al-
gebraic expressions to robot programs helps motivate
elementary algebra, a typical subject addressed in mid-
dle schools.
Programming for addressing CT aspects
As discussed in section 4.1 above, well designed program-
ming activities can be used to address all CT aspects. In
the following, we give some examples of programming activ-
ities for each of the nine aspects:
 • Data collection: parsing information from a text, fetch-
ing data from web sites or databases, collecting own
data through different sensors (“quantified self”), etc.
• Data analysis: creating a library of basic statistical
analysis methods, making sense of collected data through
custom-written programs, creating models using graph-
ical programming environments to find patterns and
draw conclusions about data, etc.
• Data representation: using different data structures,
creating visualizations, building interactive graphics
and stories, etc.
• Problem decomposition: formulating a solution to a
larger problem and breaking the solution down into
smaller tasks to be dealt with, visualizing a hierar-
chical structure (e.g. a species classification) by first
visualizing individual parts, etc.
• Algorithms: designing a step-by-step solution to a prob-
lem using, for example, unplugged instructions, graph-
ical programming environments, robots or program-
ming languages, etc.
• Abstraction: using larger programming blocks (e.g.
procedures) to encapsulate repeated parts of the pro-
gram, etc.
• Simulation: creating simple simulations of everyday
actions in graphical programming environments, adding
new actors/variables, making changes and “what if”
analyses, etc.
• Automation: creating scripts for tedious and frequently
occurring tasks, generating invitation cards where the
names are automatically filled out, replacing words
with others, etc.
• Parallelization: working on a programming task simul-
taneously together with someone else, having several
scripts running at the same time, etc.
In order to make it possible to use programming as a tool
for addressing all CT capabilities, there needs to be some
common ground and consensus with regard to what pro-
gramming is and how it should be introduced at different
levels taking into account the age of the students. Without
concrete examples and suggestions, there is a risk of pro-
gramming being introduced in a variety of more and less
appropriate ways, providing notably different possibilities
for students in different schools [113].
Many of the current curricular and informal initiatives
mentioned above use graphical programming environments.
An early and well-known language for graphical program-
ming is Logo [92], conceived by Papert in 1967 to let chil-
dren develop their creativity and problem solving skills. In
essence, pictures could be drawn on the screen by provid-
ing instructions based on a small set of simple movement
commands to a small turtle (a sort of simulated robot). To-
day, there are a multitude of programming tools that are
inspired by and can be seen as variations of Logo, for ex-
ample, in the form of mobile apps (e.g. Kodable [83] and
Lightbot [89]), Turtle graphics environments (e.g. Kojo [85]
and Turtle Academy [125]) and simple robots (e.g. Bee-Bot
[8]). (More on the Bee-Bot in Section 6.2.6.)
17
Another popular type of graphical environments imple-
ments block-based programming. Examples include Scratch
[109], Snap! [119] and Alice [118] make it possible to assem-
ble programs by combining iconic commands shaped like
puzzle tiles that only match if the “code” is syntactically
correct.
In their list of guiding principles for designing construction
kits for kids within active learning contexts, Resnick and
Silverman (2005) suggest that children are to be considered
as designers and acknowledge the important role of Scratch-
like environments in that “[p]rogramming languages are the
construction kits of the computational world” [108]. The
environments mentioned above can appeal to young novices
for several reasons. For instance, the interaction is close-to
syntax-free, which removes the need to struggle with syntax
errors. Students get immediate feedback as the results of the
student’s code is visually shown when the program is run.
The environments use characters and scenes, making them
suitable for creating, for example, games and multimedia
stories. Hence, children can, for instance, animate role-play
stories with one or more characters, by reproducing personal
everyday experiences, such as going home from school.
Storytelling
Storytelling has played a role in our society and as a research
tradition since long before the computing era. Digital story-
telling has been investigated under a variety of approaches,
for example [18, 68] and in different contexts, for example
showing that it is a kind of activity where girls stand out
[78]. Important contributions concern students and adults
with learning difficulties [41]. Using a kid- and girl-friendly
environment like Scratch [109, 17], Looking Glass and Story-
telling Alice [77], whole stories can be implemented by a few
commands in repeated patterns. In early education, chil-
dren develop a narrative, with characters and dialogue, and
at the same time they learn some programming. Program-
ming is not the main learning objective, but rather a tool
for presenting the story in an entertaining way. When dif-
ficulties arise, the children want to overcome them in order
to complete their stories, rather than simply getting some
abstract code sequences correct.
One of the answers to the survey reported on in this paper
reflected on the use of Scratch for producing backgrounds for
schoolchildren’s end-of-the-year stage performances. Clearly,
this type of activity is not primarily seen as a program-
ming task. Rather students are introduced to a new tool
to produce what they used to obtain with other, more tra-
ditional, materials such as colors, paper, clothes, mirrors
and so on. Interactive backgrounds can reused and easily
adapted to different shows each time they are run. In this
way the teacher and her schoolchildren can invent a per-
formance plot, begin a story they intend to produce, make
drawings, introduce characters and roles, create a sort of
storyboard, discuss what is most appropriate to do with a
computer, try some solutions and finally make decisions.
Educational robotics
Educational robotics refers to activities with different types
of robots that students instruct and direct by programming.
Robots can be both unplugged and technology-based. When
talking about unplugged robots, the basic idea is to help a
“robot” do a given task, by giving it clear and precise instruc-
tions in a given order. Students can for instance make their

Figure 4: A subset of instruction cards for dance
programming created by Karin Nygårds in Sweden
(http://karinskod.blogspot.com)
teacher or peers lift a cup from the table, move from one end
of the room to another or sort candy into piles. This can be
done individually or in teams with several robots making it
possible for teams to compete against each other. For in-
stance, while the teacher or a student role-plays the robot,
students are required to apply a given set of instructions in
order to get the robot to carry out some given task.
This type of activity is also well suited for engaging par-
ents in their children’s learning: for instance by arranging
parent-children-workshops, where students are to “program”
their parents through an obstacle course using a simple set of
instructions [44]. Another version of this kind of unplugged
programming is dance programming, where students pro-
gram each other to perform a given dance, for example, us-
ing handmade cards (Figure 4). As a matter of fact, we
just need a little imagination to devise plenty of unplugged
activities of this kind.
With regard to physical robots, the number of alterna-
tives to choose from has risen notably during only a couple
of years. There is now a wide range of robots that can be
used for introducing CT aspects to children starting at a very
young age (e.g. Bee-Bots [8] and Play-I [107]) going up to
older age levels (e.g. Lego Mindstorms, [88]). Low-cost and
accessible robots aimed at children have also raised inter-
est on the crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter [81], where
several related projects have been funded.
In [38] the expression “concrete programming” is intro-
duced to describe activities with RCX and NXT Lego robots,
which have to move along a given path. The term concrete
programming reflects what happens in the classroom — the
students themselves move along the path in order to de-
cide on which commands to give the robot. Commonly the
command sequence is built up by subsequences that are ver-
ified by simply checking whether the robots move in the
anticipated and desired way. Using small robots, interesting
problems to be solved are (almost) suggested by the device
itself – young children want to see the robot move and then
simply invent something to be done by their robot.
Robots can also be used for finding general solutions.
While executing activities with the Lego robots students
can discover that one program drawing geometrical shapes
always draws the same figures, while another solution could
draw different shapes if the robot is controlled by means of
sensors rather than by commands with static input. Simi-
18
larly, a robot dance is attractive though very simple to pro-
gram — either as a dance that always looks the same at
every program execution or as a varying dance depending
on the rhythms, given for example by clapping hands or by
switching on and off some lights.
Creating interactive cards and posters
Students of all ages are used to creating posters in different
subjects and creating cards for Mother’s and Father’s Day,
Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Using technology, such as
simple web programming or animation (e.g. in Scratch),
these posters and cards can be made interactive, hence in-
troducing CT aspects, in particular problem decomposition,
algorithms and automation. When creating posters of a
project or groupwork, children also engage in data collec-
tion and analysis.
Experimenting and simulating
Students often observe and conduct experiments on the world
around them. In this respect, making models and simula-
tion would contribute to improving their understanding of
natural phenomena. For example, observation of a plant in
the windowsill growing from a seed can give rise to a variety
of CT activities:
• Collecting data on the size of the plant, external cir-
cumstances (temperature, light, watering it etc), then
representing these data in appropriate charts (possibly
by using spreadsheet or other software)
• Modeling the growth pattern of the plant in relation to
time and external circumstances and making an inter-
active simulation (e.g.in the form of a Scratch game).
Then, applying scientific method, improving the model
and simulation based on observations of the behavior
of the simulation.
Playing educational games
Many students enjoy playing computer games, and there are
many types that can be valuable when looking at CT from
an educational perspective. In addition to commercial, high
budget, simulation and strategy games such as The Sims,
Hay Day and Civilization, there are also many other game
resources (see e.g. Educative-Games.org [49]) that can be
used to support the development of CT related skills.
6.2 More extensive activities
The extensive activities presented in this subsection en-
compass a variety of the smaller activities discussed so far.
Most of them are based on the authors’ experience of col-
laboration with teachers.
6.2.1 Testing generalizations about texts
Students in literature classes often make generalizations
about authors and their work. For example, students who
have read a single play by Shakespeare have no issues mak-
ing major claims about his entire oeuvre. Erroneous gen-
eralizations can be corrected directly by the teacher or can
be handled by asking students to support them, which they
typically cannot. But while this approach may encourage
students to think seriously about offering support and evi-
dence for their arguments, it may also discourage them from
thinking broadly about the texts they read. To test intu-
itions that deal with large number of texts, for example the
37 plays written by Shakespeare, one needs an efficient way
to deal with a large amount of information. The widespread
availability of digital texts and free online tools for analyzing
them makes it relatively easy to generate data about texts.
Even for intuitions that focus on only one text, these tools
can still be efficient and illuminating.
The following activity [116] assumes that students will
have read Macbeth and several sonnets by Shakespeare. The
activity was developed by a 10th grade English teacher but
could be adapted to lower grades with a different choice of
author and with sufficient scaffolding of the activity. The
central focus of the unit is a close reading of Romeo and
Juliet based on an examination of word choice, imagery, and
syntax. The work for the project involves three to four class
days of work as well as some related homework. The unit
is divided into three parts: introducing the approach, us-
ing the approach on Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, and
finally generating and testing intuitions independently. The
teacher models the process of testing intuitions using text
analysis as follows:
1. Form or identify intuitions
2. Hypothesize results, what results would suggest / con-
firm your claims?
3. Apply the tool(s), e.g. TAPor [122] and TagCrowd
[121]
4. Analyze results and assess the intuition
5. Form conclusions
This process involves CT in every step. To form an intu-
ition, students must abstract ideas from the text to design
an intuition and then construct results that would confirm
their claims. Finally, the connection between the intuition
and the hypothesis must be evaluated. Using the tool(s) in-
volves computation, albeit indirectly. Analyzing the results
is a form of evaluation, and drawing conclusions involves
both evaluation and abstraction.
When modeling intuitions, there are two types of thoughts
that can be considered. The first are intuitions that could
be answered through a traditional reading of the text but
for which textual analysis might provide support, such as
“Macbeth is the most violent character in the play.” The
second are claims that must be supported by evidence drawn
from a number of texts, such as “Shakespeare’s plays are
violent.” For both types of intuitions, the instructor goes
through the five steps given above, so that students could see
that while the tools produce results quickly, it is necessary to
spend time reviewing the results to see if they produce useful
evidence for the claims. After the introduction of the textual
analysis process, students work in small groups to use a tool
to answer a question that relates to the class’ work on Romeo
and Juliet or the sonnets. Each group is assigned to use one
of the tools demonstrated, including programs that allow
users to examine collocation and word frequency. Students
follow the process, write a report describing their findings,
present that report to the class, and offer an assessment of
the tool’s capabilities and drawbacks. Finally, later in the
term, students are asked to form intuitions independently
and to explain how they would apply one of the text analysis
tools to test that hypothesis.
19
6.2.2 Effective note-taking
Effective note taking is essential for every student, but it
is usually assumed and rarely verified. In a subject like his-
tory where understanding and classifying information during
a lecture is important this is particularly problematic. Ef-
ficacious note taking is not a passive activity, since a good
set of notes should be an accurate record not just of what
the teacher said, but also of the broader discussion includ-
ing student comments and questions, and is a multi-stage
process. The goals of the activities [116] introduced into the
American history course are to use CT to help students:
• Improve their note-taking ability
• Improve their active-listening skills
• Recognize the difference between homework and study-
ing
• Improve their recall skills
The activities ask students to use hashtags to improve
their understanding of the process of note taking. The activ-
ities involve abstraction (to identify appropriate hashtags),
evaluation (to consider if an effective set of hashtags has been
chosen and applied correctly), and recollection (because the
purpose of the hashtags is to allow classification and recall of
information). This activity was developed and implemented
by a high-school (10th grade) teacher but could be adapted
for lower grades with sufficient scaffolding.
The activities are sequenced as follows:
1. Give a formal presentation on the definition and value
of efficacious note taking. Preface the presentation
with a discussion of note taking and affirm student
observations whenever possible.
2. Introduce the idea of hashtagging. This activity will
help students to understand that hashtags are useful
for note taking because it allows someone to choose
the term or phrase that will best help them retain and
retrieve the information they have recorded. It is im-
portant to convey that effective hashtags are based on
a thoughtful abstraction of the material and will not
be proper nouns or words from the lecture. Assign as
homework a short reading on hashtagging, to be dis-
cussed during lecture the next day.
3. Present a short, formal lecture of approximately twenty
minutes in length, during which students need to take
class notes. The instructor should identify in advance
up to ten key ideas that students might plausibly tag.
At the end of the lecture students will be asked to qui-
etly read over their lecture notes, adding or correcting
information as necessary and supplying a maximum of
ten tags for key ideas in their notes. Finally students
will, in small groups, compare, contrast, and debate
their hashtag choices and then present a summary of
their work to the group for consideration.
4. Present a longer, formal history lecture of about thirty
minutes in duration for which students need to take
notes. As with the last step, the teacher will have iden-
tified up to ten likely ideas that the students might
plausibly tag. This time students will correct and
augment their notes as homework, again identifying
 a maximum of ten hashtags in the margins of their
notes. The ten tags will also be recorded on a sepa-
rate piece of paper to be submitted to the teacher. In
the following class their work will be reviewed in small
groups and then with the larger class. This process,
and variations of it, will be repeated with regularity
throughout the year. It will be applied not only to
lectures but also to large group discussions and other
classroom activities. Later a similar process will be
used to improve students’ critical reading skills.
6.2.3 Archaeology of Information
The genesis of key ideas in the early cultures can pro-
vide useful guidelines for the learning process. Moreover,
introducing concepts and techniques in their early, simpler
forms helps children’s metacognition. Specifically, key ideas
and cultural achievements pertaining the sphere of CT are
approached from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving
ancient history, mathematics, science and, in the primary
school, engaging “craftwork” tasks.
The activities are organized in a set of self-contained units
that can be variously combined to accommodate for different
needs and/or constraints. The broadest implementation of
this program has been carried out for primary-school grades
4–5 [10]; parts of the program have also been adapted for
primary-school grade 2 and for middle-school grade 6. It is
probably most appropriate for primary-school grade 3–5.
Here is a summary of the main topics:
1. Counting and communicating with the body. While
having fun inventing their own body codes, in imita-
tion of prehistoric populations, children can appreciate
the conventional nature of codes.
2. Counting and communicating with objects and notches.
Children work with counters (pebbles, twigs, grains,
shells, marks on stones, etc.) and quantity models
(heaps or bunches of items) that play also the role of
permanent storage devices.
3. Counting and data processing with tokens. Children
reproduce a variety of clay tokens and can experience
a first example of “amenability to manipulation” in the
formal treatment of information.
4. Writing numerals and syllables. By observing and pro-
ducing clay tablets, children have the opportunity to
deal with deeper syntactic structures, to develop more
abstract mental models, and to learn unusual ways of
coding numbers in mixed bases.
5. Checking for information consistency. The introduc-
tion of tallies in the prehistory marked an unprece-
dented degree of abstraction and objectivity in dealing
with information. Their use as “contracts” is connected
to a rudimentary “error” checking device.
6. Carrying out algorithmic procedures. The material com-
ing from the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations is
very rich from an educational viewpoint. In particu-
lar, children can experience interesting examples of al-
gorithmic procedures by applying the elaborate tech-
niques of Egyptian arithmetics in hieroglyphic nota-
tion.
20
7. Complying to syntactic rules. Quipus are very peculiar
way of coding numerical and non-numerical informa-
tion in knotted-string artifacts where the “syntax rules”
play an important role.
8. Understanding instruments for data processing. By
comparing the additive Roman notation, written with
the stylus on wax tablets, with the positional notation
represented in the Roman abaci, children can better
appreciate that a code can be more or less amenable
to manipulation.
9. Toward the idea of computing machine. The last units
overview a range of abaci which have been in use for
centuries in different areas of the world (schoty, suan-
pan, soroban, reckoning tables, etc.). A major point of
interest in the abaci stems from the fact that this kind
of artifacts opens the way to the idea of computing ma-
chines and to the development of more sophisticated
instruments from the 16th century onwards.
6.2.4 CS and Nursery Rhymes
The ability to spontaneously search for and analyze struc-
tures as well as (variant and invariant) patterns forms the
basis for understanding information processing. Moreover,
unplugged tasks can help avoid stereotypical views of com-
puting. The approach is cross-disciplinary, involving mother
as well as foreign languages, mathematics, science and, pos-
sibly, music.
This program has been carried out within the middle-
school instruction cycle [42], grades 6–8, but can be also
appropriate for primary-school grade 3–5.
The “nursery rhymes” theme is naturally linked to the
pupils’ experiences in their home. The main steps of this
path can be summarized as follows:
1. The pupils collect several examples of nursery rhymes,
taken from their personal experiences, which are then
analyzed in order to recognize repeats and, within each
refrain, fixed and varying parts.
2. The students try to identify formal structures (e.g.,
prologue + repeated refrain + epilogue), whereas the
meaning and aims of the tiny stories are discussed with
the teachers of mother language and history.
3. The “mechanisms” that govern the simplest types of
nursery rhymes are elaborated in playful activities,
where the pupils engage themselves in the construction
of concrete models — toy machines — using cardboard
and other cheap materials.
4. Later, they can verify their ideas by trying out exper-
iments on a larger set of examples with the aid of a
specific application: besides implementing a few tradi-
tional nursery rhymes, the pupils can also invent new
ones of their own.
5. After introducing the rudiments of programming (e.g.,
in Logo or Scratch), the students try to develop pro-
grams to automate the generation of simple nursery
rhymes. Through this work they can also gain a bet-
ter understanding of what is going on “backstage” of
the specific application they used.
 6. The students are invited to reflect and to discuss about
the potentials and limits of the toy application in the
light of what they have learnt from programming, as
well as to try to take a similar critical attitude towards
the software tools they use in their everyday activities.
6.2.5 Welcome to Nimrod
Abstract concepts of such immaterial entities as informa-
tion and algorithms can be developed as a result of cognitive
processes involving the relationships between heterogeneous
semiotic representations, including simple “unplugged” ar-
tifacts that can be built with paper and cardboard. The
overall material can be approached from the perspectives
of mathematics, science, modern history, technology and,
possibly, also philosophy (Lipman’s Philosophy for Children
[90]).
This program has been implemented within the middle-
school cycle [98], grades 6–8. With minor modifications, it
is probably also appropriate for the early upper secondary
level, grades 9–10.
Nimrod was a demonstration nim-player machine, meant
to draw the public’s attention to the potential of the first
commercial modern computer, the Ferranti Mark I, pre-
sented in that exhibition. This event provides a rich source
of ideas for a program aimed at introducing CT ideas in an
engaging way:
1. Festival of Britain, May 1951. This event gives the op-
portunity to talk about the development of computing
technologies in the years 1935–1950. In particular, the
Ferranti computer and a simple mobile phone of our
days can be compared in terms of size and features of
their components.
2. A new game to learn. Nimrod is good at playing nim,
a game for two players. Pupils aged 11–14 seem to get
very engaged when they play with each other. After
learning the simple rules of the game, they are invited
to imagine suitable strategies to win.
3. Nim player imitation game. Pupils play nim in pairs
through the computers of the local network in a situ-
ation which is reminiscent of Turing’s imitation game:
they do not know whether they are playing against
their peers or against a computer program, but have
to try to figure out who their opponent is. This is
also an opportunity to reflect on the nature of a play-
ing strategy, the role of chance and the possibility of
thinking of a strategy in abstract terms.
4. Bits and strategies. An important message is that the
represented information is independent of specific tech-
nologies. These observation justifies subsequent work
with binary notation to understand how Nimrod works
and to explain the winning strategy elaborated by the
mathematician C. Bouton (1901).
5. Magic tricks with bits. To reinforce the understanding
of the formal treatment at the basis of Nimrod’s in-
ternal logic, the pupils have to build a paper model of
its internal state which consists of a grid on a sheet, a
set of binary (0/1) tiles, plus a couple of arrow icons.
Then, they can apply Bouton’s strategy by turning
tiles and placing arrows on the grid sheet.
21
6. Algorithmic procedures. The ideas of algorithmic pro-
cedure and computer program are introduced through
the use of an interactive simulation that reproduces
Nimrod’s monitor and panels (that show the program
flow-chart and dataset).
7. Glass-box technology. Given the appropriate layout
printed on paper, the pupils build a cardboard comput-
ing artifact based on sliding strips that automatically
ensure consistency between the standard visualization
of the game configuration and the corresponding inter-
nal binary representation.
8. Bird’s-eye view of a general procedure. Pupils have to
work with representations of Nimrod’s strategy of a
more abstract nature with respect to those considered
previously, with the purpose of moving from concrete
to more abstract mental views: All possible evolutions
of the game for given (simple) initial configurations can
be approached as Manhattan paths in a grid. With the
aid of paper, pencil, scissors and glue it is also possible
to gain some understanding of why Bouton’s strategy
can be successful.
9. A bit of philosophy. Moreover, a digression on “elec-
tronic brains” and the reference to the Turing test in-
troduce interesting themes to elaborate on under Lip-
man’s methodology of philosophy for children (P4C)
[90]. A couple of sessions can be planned where the
pupils are able to confront their spontaneous questions
and opinions about the power and limits of computers
in connection with the abilities of human mind.
6.2.6 Bee-Bots in Education
There are robots for all ages [39]. The Bee-Bot [8] is a mini
robot in the shape of a big bee, normally used from the last
year of kindergarten and in first and second grades of basic
education. The bee is programmed by physically pressing
buttons on its back. It has six buttons which can be used to
move (15 cm forward or backward), turn (90 degrees to the
left or the right), start (to execute the program, i.e. move
after one or several buttons have been pushed) and delete
(to erase all previous commands).
In the following, we describe some activities that can be
used to progressively cover CT concepts with the Bee-Bot
with children starting at age 5-6.
Reasoning about distances covered by the Bee-Bot and com-
paring them. There are many variations to this activity,
where students can work on problems like making their Bee-
Bot move further than the Bee-Bot of a classmate or making
it move twice/half the distance covered by another student’s
Bee-Bot. Regardless of the specific problem to solve, stu-
dents make the robot move using only the forward button,
and then stick a piece of tape on the floor to mark the path
covered and keep track of the number of times the forward
button has been pressed. Students can ,for example, make
a note of each press on the tape. This makes it possible to
practice the arithmetics they have in their curriculum work-
ing with one digit numbers and informally introducing the
concept of direct proportion.
Discovering what “programming” is. When small children
get their hands on the Bee-Bot for the first time, they will
most likely press the buttons randomly; they are interested
in seeing what happens, not necessarily making the connec-
tion between the button presses and the movement of the
bee. One way of getting children realize that the buttons
need to be pressed in a given order if they want to attain a
given result, is to ask them to help the bee move to a certain
place. In order to make this easier for the children, one can,
for instance, use a big paper which is divided into a matrix
of squares sized 15 x 15 cm squares. The length of the side
of a square hence matches one step of the Bee-Bot. The
children can then be asked to plan a path for the Bee-Bot,
placed in one square, to reach an object placed in another
square. Children plan different paths and draw them on the
paper, decide which command sequence is needed to cover
the path and get the bee to execute that sequence. If the bee
did not reach its goal, the children go back and correct the
sequence and eventually the object is reached. This activity
hence helps children discover programming and debugging.
Reasoning about geometrical shapes. Once students know
how to make the bee cover a given path by programming
it, they can move on to working on problems such as the
following:
1. Make the Bee-Bot go back to the starting point
2. Make the Bee-Bot draw a rectangle (or another shape)
on the floor
While solving these problems by programming the Bee-
Bot, schoolchildren experiment with angles and several ge-
ometrical concepts, as described in [39]. Children learn, for
instance, that the inside angles of a rectangle sum up to 360
degrees, as the bee comes back to its start-position if it draws
a rectangle on the floor. Similarly, children can discover that
the Bee-Bot cannot draw a triangle. For the first activity,
several solutions exist and children also discover that prob-
lems given by the teacher can be discussed, perhaps finding
that it is ill-posed and thus requiring a change in their for-
mulation. For instance, by comparing different solutions, a
class can conclude that paths have different properties, for
instance, which path is the shortest, but the problem de-
scription was not asking for a path with a particular prop-
erty (e.g. find the shortest way for the robot to come back
to the starting point). Activities of this kind are inspired by
[6] (p. 25).
Learning about arithmetic operations. With children aged
eight and above the Bee-Bot can be used for activities cover-
ing measures and counting. To start with, the Bee-Bot can
be programmed to move from one point to another on a floor
without measure references. The objective of the activity is
to have students determine how far the Bee-Bot moves at
each step. The instructor introduces the concept of measure:
if the bee has to cover a given distance how many presses
are required? How can we tell how far the bee went? How
do we measure the distance covered? Here different mea-
suring “tools” can be introduced, starting from simple laces
going towards the ruler. To determine how far the bee goes
with a given number of button presses, addition (adding the
length of one step to the previous ones) and multiplication
(multiplying the number of steps times the space covered by
the single step) can be discussed. Children can draw paths
on squared paper (e.g. in their notebooks) as they did on
the big squared paper in earlier activities, and at this point
the Cartesian plane can be introduced.
6.3 Dissemination of best practices
As has already been pointed out earlier in this report,
a large number of high quality and best-practice activities
22
already exist, ranging from individual and free-standing ex-
ercises such as Google’s CT activities and CS Unplugged, to
more or less large scale materials aligned with local curric-
ula. In order to make it easier for teachers to find suitable
and relevant ideas and teaching material, a central repos-
itory would be highly useful. In the following we briefly
discuss some criteria that we think need to be taken into
account when designing such a repository.
The repository can be anything from a local website col-
lecting links to suitable material to a multilingual and search-
able database. The first step is to decide on the size and
scope of the repository. The bigger the collection becomes,
the more flexible and broad coverage it offers, but at the
same time it naturally requires more effort in terms of main-
tenance.
If the repository is created as a database, the optimal so-
lution would be for it to allow teachers to add their own
activities, which could then be translated into other lan-
guages. Contributions could be allowed on a continuous ba-
sis or in a more controlled manner through, for example,
regular “call for proposals”. This, however, raises questions
related to ownership, moderation and quality control. Per-
haps the easiest way of ensuring quality would be to use
rating systems similar to those popular within social media.
This would allow for an informal peer review, making it pos-
sible to find high quality activities based on popularity and
high ratings.
In order to make the repository usable, it should be easy
to find suitable activities based on different search criteria.
Each activity would hence need to be tagged based on a
set of given features, including, for example, CT concept,
subject, learning objectives and school level.
6.4 Training teachers
It is unreasonable to expect that our students will ever
gain the skills and knowledge to succeed in the 21st century,
if they are taught primarily by the educators trained using
a model developed in the 20th century. It is necessary to
rethink and overhaul the teacher training and professional
development programs, in order to recruit and retain high
achieving educators who have up-to-date knowledge of 21st
century skills. Studies show that a teacher’s qualifications
have a significant effect on students’ performance, more so
than any other variable [2].
Teachers located in countries of various sizes with differing
educational structures, who teach in a variety of grade lev-
els, and who may have had training in such vastly different
subjects as math, science, languages and arts are all in the
target audience for the professional development efforts sug-
gested in this report. By definition, this means that a single
approach is unlikely to be applicable in all circumstances.
Opportunities needs to be created for both in-service and
pre-service teachers as well as for both general and subject
teachers.
The data from our survey suggest that certain areas are
particularly fruitful for professional development. For ex-
ample, we identified that there were some common miscon-
ceptions among teachers regarding what is meant by various
types of CT. Successful infusion of CT will only occur when
teachers understand and are able to identify how it is rel-
evant to the topics they teach. It is hence important that
teacher training activities aim at clarifying what is meant
by each type of CT concept and support teachers in cre-
ating and implementing activities that use CT in the most
beneficial way. In addition, teachers need good examples of
activities in order to see how they and their students will
benefit from the extra work required to enhance or infuse
CT into their classrooms.
Further, our data indicate that teachers are much more
likely to be working with certain types of CT, such as data
collection, and much less likely to be working with other
types of CT such as simulations. Developing sample exam-
ples, courses, and other materials in underutilized CT areas
has the most potential to impact the broad implementation
of CT in the curriculum. Here teachers should to be involved
in order to identify what existing material can be modified
to include CT content and/or what material can be added
to the curriculum.
In addition, teachers need support in entering a situation
where they are not necessarily on top of all the concepts and
material before introducing them in the classroom. This
involves fostering an open atmosphere where teachers and
students can learn together. Support from others at the local
school is also important — ranging from administrators and
IT-personnel to colleagues (e.g. through local teacher teams
that can work on integrating CT together).
There are professional development programs that can
serve as models. These do not explicitly target CT, but
rather programming or CS. This should however not be seen
as a problem as the same models can be used for CT as well.
Several of them are collaborative efforts between schools and
universities, where theoretical and research based ideas can
be combined with and empirically evaluated in real-life class-
room settings.
For instance, the ”Teachers for Teachers” (T4T) project at
the University of Torino in Italy involves a group of teach-
ers from all education levels, who together with university
researchers develop original CS activities in schools. A set
of suggested activities are chosen by a group of responsible
teachers. These teachers develop lesson plans based on the
suggestions and use these plans in their classrooms. Based
on the results, the activities are improved and finetuned to-
gether with researchers. The evaluated and revised activities
are then normally distributed to other teachers at the be-
ginning of the following school year through hands-on work-
shops at the university. The workshops are offered free of
charge as half-day modules, which teachers can choose from.
The name, Teachers for Teachers, comes from this sharing
nature of the model — teachers learn from other teachers
who share their experience and possibly continue to cooper-
ate during the following school year. T4T has been offered
annually since 2011 and is partly supported by Google.
The modules offered during T4T concern activities for
teachers with very varying CS background — some have
almost no experience with CS, whereas others have done
quite a lot and mainly want to share their experiences and
find ideas for new types of activities. The former group of
teachers can be introduced to the Bee-Bot and storytelling
using Scratch, whereas teachers looking for something more
advanced have, for instance, been involved in activities con-
cerning using open data with students to engage in real life
projects.
In preparation for the September 2014 rollout of the re-
quired computing curriculum in secondary schools in Eng-
land, the Computing at School project [26] developed a
Certificate of Computing Education accreditation program.
23
The program provides professional recognition by BCS, which
is the chartered institute for IT in the UK. While this teacher
training program has grown significantly in response to the
new curriculum it has as its foundation a series of regional
hubs, which were developed as a part of the grassroots effort
by CAS to broaden the teaching of computing in the UK.
CAS hubs are meetings of teachers and lecturers who wish
to share ideas about teaching computing in their schools,
classrooms, and communities. The hub network has been
credited in part with the success of the CAS project in that
teacher isolation is reduced and teachers become more ener-
getic after participating in activities and meetings organized
by the hubs. Encouraging suitable candidates to consider
teaching as a career is, nevertheless, recognised as a chal-
lenge [14].
One of the most successful U.S. curricular and professional
development projects focused on teachers in lower levels of
education is the Exploring Computer Science project [53].
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project’s
mission is to increase and enhance CS learning opportuni-
ties in the Los Angeles Unified School District. One of its
goals is to broaden the participation of African-American,
Latino/a, and female students. The project is a partner-
ship between university and K-12 researchers and now has
multiple national partners, including the Taste of Comput-
ing project mentioned below. The curriculum is project-
and inquiry-based and is designed to foster critical think-
ing, problem solving, and creativity. Since the project uses
pedagogies that are different from what many teachers may
be accustomed to, a significant part of the project is profes-
sional development, including a summer institute and ongo-
ing workshops during the academic year.
In addition to the organizations described above, there are
a multitude of teacher professional development workshops
that various (typically university) academics have produced
and given in more localized regions. Often these workshops
focus on a curriculum either developed by the researchers
giving the workshops or borrowed from other (again, typi-
cally university) researchers. A comprehensive list of these
workshops is beyond the scope of this report, but we men-
tion two from the U.S. to provide a sense of the kind of work
done:
• The “MyCS” project [102], which stands for “Middle
Years Computer Science” is an online CS curriculum
designed by researchers at Harvey Mudd College in the
U.S. for middle- to early high-school. The project was
created in 2010 and regular summer workshops have
been offered since that time. The first MOOC based
on the curriculum will be offered in January 2015 in
an effort to reach more teachers on a broader scale.
• Taste of Computing [123] is a National Science Foun-
dation funded project developed by researchers at De-
Paul University designed to improve and expand CS
education at school throughout the Chicago Public
Schools system. The project includes the creation of a
CS courses that will serve as the introductory course
for all tracks in a three-year Career and Technology
Education InfoTech program, a comprehensive teacher
training course including a week-long summer work-
shop, and a series of professional development mini-
workshops offered during the academic year. Partici-
pating teachers earn three semester college credit hours
 that they can apply toward professional development.
7. CONDUCTING RESEARCH ON CT AT
SCHOOL
Making changes in what is taught and the ways in which
teaching is done always raises many questions. As discussed
in this report, there are several open questions, such as:
• What skills and competencies related to CT do we
want children of different ages to acquire?
• How can curricula and teacher training be revised and
developed to support the development of the skills?
• How should CT be covered in basic education — as a
subject of its own right or included in other subjects?
• How can we motivate and prepare teachers for such
changes in their teaching activities?
• Can introducing CT at a broader scale improve the im-
age of and interest for CS among the public in general,
and currently underrepresented groups in particular?
• How accurately do the nine CSTA/ISTE categories
characterize CT? Are they reasonable/acceptable or
too broad for use in the K-9 classroom? Are some
concepts lacking (e.g. design? efficiency?) or should
some be emphasized less?
• What is specific of a CT-approach to working with
data collection, analysis and representation?
• What characteristics does a successful outreach pro-
gram have?
In addition to these broad questions, there is naturally
also a multitude of more focused questions that need to be
addressed in order to arrive at some kind of consensus re-
garding the answers to the broader ones. Similarly to the
research on teaching and learning conducted in other sub-
ject areas and at other levels, we need to address questions
related to attitudes, experiences, assessment, challenges:
• What are students’ and teachers’ attitudes and expe-
rience of introducing CT in the classroom?
• What type of challenges and difficulties do students ex-
perience when engaging with or learning about a given
CT aspect?
• How do we assess CT related skills at different educa-
tional levels?
As to the second question, indeed, Hu (2011) observes that
“[i]f the mainstream of computational thinking is thinking
about process abstraction, then Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cog-
nitive Development may suggest that this thinking skill can-
not be effectively taught until adolescence age” [70]. On the
other hand, the relevance of finding ways to answer, even
partially, the last question is pointed out, for instance, by
Werner et al. (2012), in that “[E]fforts to engage K-12 stu-
dents in CT are hampered by a lack of definition and as-
sessment tools” [128]. (Among the few attempts in this di-
rection, we can mention Brennan and Resnick’s framework
[13].)
24
Other central questions, either underinvestigated or still
left to be answered, are raised by Grover and Pea (2013):
“How can CT be recognized? What is the best pedagogy for
promoting CT among children? Can programming, com-
puters, and CT be legitimately separated?” Which “transfer
of problem-solving skills in other domains”? What “can we
expect children to know or do better once they’ve been par-
ticipating in a curriculum designed to develop CT and how
can this be evaluated?” According to them, indeed, without
“attention to assessment, CT can have little hope of making
its way successfully into any K-12 curriculum.” [65].
Up to now, most of the efforts to educate teachers to infuse
CT in their classroom have been addressed to CS teachers
[134], and only to a limited extent to high school mathemat-
ics and science teachers [101]. Then, according to Yadav et
al. (2014) “future research should examine how” primary
school teachers as well as “teachers from a variety of disci-
plines incorporate computational-thinking practices in their
own teaching. Future research should also examine effective
approaches (modules, webquests, activities, projects, etc.)
to engage preservice teachers in CT ideas and improving
their knowledge, skills, and attitudes in computing” [134].
Depending on the chosen research questions, different re-
search methods and frameworks may be applicable. In any
case, many of the questions above call for empirical stud-
ies, where researchers work in close collaboration with both
teachers and students in order to collect data to help an-
swer the research question at hand through observations,
questionnaires, tests, and interviews. One framework suit-
able for this type of research is action research, in which
practitioners aim at improving practice by doing something
or making changes and then reflecting on the results. The
improvement can come in three forms: improving a practice;
improving the understanding of a practice [...] and improv-
ing the situation in which the practice takes place [21] (p.
106). Within the action research framework different meth-
ods can be applied in order to answer relevant questions.
8. FINAL WORDS
In this report, we have given an overview of the current
status of CT in education based on a literature review, na-
tional documents and discussions as well as the results from
a teacher survey. The survey findings suggest that teach-
ers, and hence also students, already engage in activities
supporting, or having the potential to support, the devel-
opment of some aspects of CT in the classroom. Not sur-
prisingly, most focus is put on collecting, analysing and rep-
resenting data. While initiatives introducing programming
clearly will deal with the second cluster (problem decompo-
sition, algorithms and abstraction), special attention needs
to be paid to also cover the three final skills (automation,
simulation, parallelization). The results provide a sense of
direction with regard to what to cover in professional devel-
opment courses for in- and pre-service courses. Our investi-
gation makes an important contribution in that it is a first
attempt to make available empirical data for further com-
parisons between countries. Similarly, our review of current
curricula shows how CT aspects can be introduced in teach-
ing without a need for revising any governing documents,
by looking at and interpreting learning objectives through a
CT-lens.
Introducing CT using tailored activities focusing on differ-
ent skills and concepts makes it easier to show teachers that
integrating CT in education is feasible. Our survey results
suggest that teachers already do quite a lot and cover several
of the abilities — this eases the burden on the teachers, who
can instead focus on learning and teaching the concepts and
skills that are yet to be discovered. However, in order to
motivate teachers to actually want to learn about CT, they
have to feel that doing so will result in positive benefits for
both them and their students. Having access to high-quality
professional development courses as well as motivating and
engaging material is therefore crucial.
We intend for this report to aid teachers, those involved
in teacher training, and policy makers in making informed
decisions about how and when CT concepts and skills can be
integrated in their local curricula and context. We will con-
tinue our investigation at school level by involving teachers
from additional countries, in order to paint a more complete
picture of the current status of CT in education. As a further
continuation, it would be interesting to develop an instru-
ment for assessing differences between a teacher’s perception
and a computer scientist’s perspective on activities carried
out by teachers who are motivated to teach CT, in order to
make it easier to devise materials that could make a differ-
ence for both their understanding of CT and their teaching
practice. Finally, while working on the report, the role of
programming in early education as a means to develop CT
stood out as a particularly interesting area for further stud-
ies. Finding ways to make all aspects of CT part of the
everyday educational activities has potential to change both
school culture and attitudes to help students develop into
creative and bold problem-solvers.
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Appendix: Survey 3. What software, technology, or other tools do you use
for the activities listed above in your teaching?
Computational thinking skills in education
• I do not use anything
Computational Thinking (CT) refers to a cross-curricular
perspective and set of problem-solving skills, whose founda- • Web resources, social media
tions should be laid in primary school to be progressively • Office applications, multimedia applications (e.g.,
developed through the schooling years. Most teachers build for drawing or photo editing)
such competencies in their classrooms, even without being • Graphical programming environment (e.g., Logo,
fully aware of it, but it is important that they are able to Scratch, Alice, Kodu, etc.)
recognize and highlight CT in their teaching. (Ref.: CSTA • Robotics (e.g., Lego Mindstorms, Bee-Bots, etc.)
and ISTE “CT in K-12 / Teacher Resources” booklet) • Programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Ruby,
An international working group is currently investigating the etc.)
role of these skills at lower levels of education (K-9) and the
• Simulations (e.g., SimCity, Algodoo, NetLogo, etc.)
final report will be published in fall. As part of this work we
are distributing this questionnaire, in order to collect data • Other: [to specify]
about to what extent and how these CT skills are included General information
in K-9 education.
The questionnaire contains eight (8) questions and respond- 1. You are: [female / male / prefer to not specify]
ing takes 5-10 minutes. The questionnaire is completely 2. Your age:
anonymous and it will not be possible to identify your an- [less than 30 / between 30 and 50 / more than 50]
swers in any way.
3. Years experience as teacher:
The questionnaire is open until June 9.
[still in training / less than 5 / between 5 and 10 /
Your response is very important to us, as we want the final
between 10 and 20 / more than 20]
report to include the experiences of as many teachers as pos-
sible, representing different subjects and different countries. 4. You teach in:
Thank you in advance! • K-5/6 (elementary school)
On behalf of the working group. • K6/7-9 (secondary school)
Questionnaire • Other: [to specify]
CT-skills in education 5. What are the main subjects you teach? (check all that
apply)
1. To what extent do your students engage in the following
activities during your lectures? • Mathematics
[Answers: Not at all – A little – Every now and then – • Natural science (biology, chemistry, physics)
Quite much – Very much] • Mother tongue
• Gathering appropriate information and selecting • Foreign languages
relevant information (data collection) • Sports
• Making sense of data, finding patterns, drawing • History, social studies
conclusions (data analysis) • Geography
• Organizing and depicting data in appropriate graphs, • Religion
charts, words, images, tables, etc. (data represen- • Craft
tation)
• Arts
• Breaking down tasks into smaller manageable parts
• Music
and merging subtasks (problem decomposition)
• Computer science, IT
• Planning and organizing sequences of steps taken
to solve a problem (algorithms) • Other technology
• Reducing complexity to define main idea, finding • Domestic science
characteristics and creating models (abstraction) • Health
• Using or creating simulations, for instance, for run- • Environmental studies
ning experiments (simulation) • Other: [to specify]
• Recognizing how technology can help us accom- If you want us to send you the final report when it is pub-
plish new tasks that would otherwise be too repet- lished, please provide your email address. The address will
itive, infeasible, or difficult (automation) not be used for any other purpose.
• Organizing resources to simultaneously and coop-
eratively carry out tasks to reach a goal (paral- Thank you!
lelization) If you are interested in computational thinking and its use
2. Please describe (briefly) two instances of when you felt in education, you can read more on, for instance, the ISTE
successful in including some of the above activities in [link] and CSTA [link] web pages. If you want to further
your teaching practice. discuss computational thinking or if you have questions or
ideas, please do not hesitate to contact [name and e-mail
address of some author(s), depending on the country].

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