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To support teachers to implement Computer Science curricula into classrooms from the very first year of school, teachers, schools and organisations seek quality curriculum resources to support implementation and teacher professional development. Until now, many Computer Science resources and outreach initiatives have targeted K-12 school-age children, with the intention to engage children and increase interest, rather than to formally teach concepts and skills. What is the educational quality of existing Computer Science resources and to what extent are they suitable for classroom learning and teaching? In this paper, an assessment framework is presented to evaluate the quality of online Computer Science resources. Further, a semi-systematic review of available online Computer Science resources was conducted to evaluate resources available for classroom learning and teaching and to identify gaps in resource availability, using the Australian curriculum as a case study analysis. The findings reveal a predominance of quality resources, however, a number of critical gaps were identified. This paper provides recommendations and guidance for the development of new and supplementary resources and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computer science education should not be based on short-term developments but on content that is observable in multiple domains of computer science, may be taught at every intellectual level, will be relevant in the longer term, and is related to everyday language and/or thinking. Recently, a catalogue of central concepts for computer science education such as algorithm, computer, and data has been empirically determined. This paper now concentrates on central processes relevant for computer science education. Experts of computer science rated 44 general-education processes regarding four criteria. By using a cluster analysis approach the following central processes for computer science education have been identified: problem solving and problem posing, analyzing, generalizing, finding relationships, classifying, and investigating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on previous research into teachers' conceptions of learning and teaching with an investigation of information technology academics. Using a phenomenographic approach to build a model of IT academics experiences and practice of teaching we aimed to identify any specific issues that academics in the IT discipline face and to assess the impact of the changing higher education environment on their teaching experiences. While there were few discipline-specific issues we did find that the current higher education environment appears to be negatively affecting the quality of teaching and learning within the IT discipline and indications are that these environmental factors are affecting academics within other disciplines. We concluded that current institutional policies, including teaching and learning quality measures and lack of resources, are compromising the way subjects are delivered. In some cases academics are discouraged from improving their teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the literature related to the learning and teaching of debugging computer programs. Debugging is an important skill that continues to be both difficult for novice programmers to learn and challenging for computer science educators to teach. These challenges persist despite a wealth of important research on the subject dating back as far as the mid 1970s. Although the tools and languages novices use for writing programs today are notably different from those employed decades earlier, the basic problem-solving and pragmatic skills necessary to debug them effectively are largely similar. Hence, an understanding of the previous work on debugging can offer computer science educators insights into how to improve contemporary learning and teaching of debugging and may suggest directions for future research into this important area. This overview of the debugging literature is organized around four questions relevant to computer science educators and education researchers: What causes bugs to occur? What types of bugs occur? What is the debugging process? How can we improve the learning and teaching of debugging? We conclude with suggestions on using the existing literature both to facilitate pedagogical improvements to debugging education and to offer guidance for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computer science high-school teaching community of practice possesses a rich collection of distributed practical knowledge consisting of individual teachers' expertise regarding pedagogy. However, without a proper means of communication and rules of discourse, the individual pieces of knowledge might not be transferred properly within the community, and eventually might get lost. Only when fertile professional communication lines have been established, can the growth of common shared, reusable knowledge bases be reinforced and nurtured. Pedagogical patterns are intended to capture the expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and to transfer that knowledge to other practitioners. This paper discusses how the culture of patterns can be employed to transfer pedagogical knowledge, and thus reinforce peer-communication and collaboration within the computer science high-school teaching community of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For beginning programmers, inadequate problem solving and planning skills are among the most salient of their weaknesses. In this paper, we test the efficacy of natural language tutoring to teach and scaffold acquisition of these skills. We describe ProPL (Pro-PELL), a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system that elicits goal decompositions and program plans from students in natural language. The system uses a variety of tutoring tactics that leverage students' intuitive understandings of the problem, how it might be solved, and the underlying concepts of programming. We report the results of a small-scale evaluation comparing students who used ProPL with a control group who read the same content. Our primary findings are that students who received tutoring from ProPL seem to have developed an improved ability to solve the composition problem and displayed behaviors that suggest they were able to think at greater levels of abstraction than students in the read-only group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many teachers experience serious problems when teaching object-orientation to beginners or professionals. Many of these problems could be overcome or reduced thorough the use of more appropriate tools. In this paper, we introduce BlueJ, an integrated development environment designed for teaching object-orientation, and discuss how the use of this tool can change the approach to teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]