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Each of the 16 federal states of Germany has its own school system and also its own policy to integrate informatics, computer science or ICT into this system. Till present there aren't any tests of students' knowledge on a nation-wide level. Therefore nation-wide or international contests currently offer the only opportunities to compare the knowledge of the participating students on a large scale level. By evaluating the overall performance of the students of different federal states, we were able to compare the effectiveness of different approaches of teaching Informatics at secondary schools.

How teachers are able to adapt to a changing environment is essentially dependent on their beliefs and motivational orientations. The development of these aspects in the context of professional competence takes place during teachers' educational phase and professional practice. The overall understanding of professional competence for teaching computer science follows the notion of empirical educational research including beliefs and motivational aspects. This article aims to investigate relevant domain-specific beliefs and motivational orientations for teaching computer science and their consideration in curricula for computer science teacher education. Therefore, results of an expert interview study based on the critical incident technique lead to appropriate descriptions for domain-relevant beliefs and motivational orientations. Results of a broad curriculum analysis indicate how those aspects are normatively considered in computer science university and school education in Germany. The data were analyzed by qualitative content analysis.

Aiming to collect various concepts, approaches, and strategies for improving computer science education in K-12 schools, we edited this second special issue of the "ACM TOCE" journal. Our intention was to collect a set of case studies from different countries that would describe all relevant aspects of specific implementations of Computer Science Education in K-12 schools. By this, we want to deliver well-founded arguments and rich material to the critical discussion about the state and the goals of K-12 computer science education, and also provide visions for the future of this research area. In this editorial, we explain our intention and report some details about the genesis of these special issues. Following, we give a short summary of the Darmstadt Model, which was suggested to serve as a structuring principle of the case studies. The next part of the editorial presents a short description of the five extended case studies from India, Korea, NRW/Germany, Finland, and USA that are selected to be included in this second issue. In order to give some perspectives for the future, we propose a set of open research questions of the field, partly derived from the Darmstadt Model, partly stimulated by a look on large-scale investigations like PISA.

To address the special challenges of teaching computer science, adequate development of teachers' competencies during their education is extremely important. In particular, pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' beliefs and motivational orientations play an important role in effective teaching. This research field has been sparsely investigated up to now and there exists no consistent competency model for teaching computer science in Germany. Therefore, this paper describes the development of competency in the areas of pedagogical content knowledge, teachers' beliefs, and motivational orientations with regard to computer science. Competency-relevant factors for teaching computer science are theoretically derived and concretely formulated with the help of expert interviews conducted according to the critical incident technique and analyzed using techniques of qualitative content analysis.

In view of the recent developments in many countries, for example, in the USA and in the UK, it appears that computer science education (CSE) in primary or secondary schools (K-12) has reached a significant turning point, shifting its focus from ICT-oriented to rigorous computer science concepts. The goal of this special issue is to offer a publication platform for soundly based in-depth experiences that have been made around the world with concepts, approaches, or initiatives that aim at supporting this shift. For this purpose, the article format was kept as large as possible, enabling the authors to explain many facets of their concepts and experiences in detail. Regarding the structure of the articles, we had encouraged the authors to lean on the Darmstadt Model, a category system that was developed to support the development, improvement, and investigation of K-12 CSE across regional or national boundaries. This model could serve as a unifying framework that might provide a proper structure for a well-founded critical discussion about the future of K-12 CSE. Curriculum designers or policy stakeholders, who have to decide, which approach an upcoming national initiative should follow, could benefit from this discussion as well as researchers who are investigating K12 CSE in any regard. With this goal in mind, we have selected six extensive and two short case studies from the UK, New Zealand, USA/Israel, France, Sweden, Georgia (USA), Russia, and Italy that provide an in-depth analysis of K-12 CSE in their respective country or state.

In 2004 the German state of Bavaria introduced a new compulsory subject of computer science (CS) in its grammar schools ("Gymnasium"). The subject is based on a comprehensive teaching concept that was developed by the author and his colleagues during the years 1995-2000. It comprises mandatory courses in grades 6/7 for all students of grammar schools and in grade 9/10 for the students of the science and technology track of this school type. In grades 11 and 12 there are elective courses that qualify for an optional graduation exam in CS. The first students that have attended the course in total graduated in 2011. This article describes the whole project in the form of an extensive case study that is guided by the "Darmstadt Model," which was developed as a category system for computer science education in secondary schools by a working group at ITiCSE 2011. This case study is the first (nearly) all-embracing discussion of the whole project that describes the long way from the original concept to the first graduates as well as the internal structure of the subject and the first results. (Contains 11 figures, 10 tables and 5 footnotes.)