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This paper reports on the results of the first phase of an ongoing research project in design-oriented education in informatics in Dutch upper secondary education. Our study focused on eliciting and categorizing the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) with respect to design of digital artefacts of the informatics teachers participating in the research project. Our results suggest that teachers’ PCK on design can be typified in terms of two aspects, namely (i) teachers’ knowledge about objectives and goals of designing digital artefacts by students, and (ii) teachers’ knowledge about ways to assess students’ understanding and performance. As to (i), we distinguish an orientation towards more conceptual objectives, and one towards more practical objectives. Also with respect to (ii), we found two types of teachers’ knowledge, one focused on process-based assessment and another on product-based assessment.

Various countries are in the process of curriculum innovation with respect to informatics, which makes it interesting to conduct a systematic international comparison. As a first step, we focus on the analysis of conceptual content of curriculum specifications, that is, formal descriptions and guidelines. As a case study, we apply our method to analyze five curriculum specifications, including the former (2007) and new (2016) Dutch informatics curriculum for upper secondary education. The results indicate interesting similarities and differences with respect to emphasis of specific conceptual areas such as algorithms, software engineering and social aspects. The method appears fruitful to determine, for example, the position of the new Dutch curriculum relative to the former curriculum and to the three other recent international specifications.

Computational Thinking (CT) is gaining a lot of attention in education. In this study we focus on the CT aspect modeling and simulation. We conducted a case study analyzing the projects of 12th grade high school informatics students in which they made models and ran simulations of phenomena from other disciplines. We constructed an analytic framework based on literature about modeling and analyzed students’ project documentation, recordings of student groups at work and during presentations, survey results and interviews with individual students. We examined how to discern the elements of our framework in the students’ work. Moreover, we determined which data sources are suitable for observing students’ learning. Finally, we investigated what difficulties students encounter while working on modeling and simulation projects. Our findings result in an operational definition of modeling and simulation, and provide input for future development of both assessment instruments and instructional strategies.

In The Netherlands, the current informatics curriculum for upper secondary education was introduced in 1998 and only slightly modified in 2007. Meanwhile, both the scientific discipline and its impact on society have developed substantially. For this main reason, a curriculum reform has been carried out which has led to a new curriculum specifying the intended learning outcomes. This country report specifies the educational context in which the reform takes place. Moreover, it decribes the reform process from various perspectives, highlights and explains the underlying design principles that guided the development of the new curriculum, and presents its main results.