Design and Analysis of a Disciplinary Computer Science Course for Pre-Service Primary Teachers

Abstract

According to new curricula being introduced in Switzerland, primary teachers have to teach concepts related to computer science (CS), but most of them have never been through a CS course themselves. At our university of teacher education, we have introduced a new disciplinary CS course for pre-service teachers, aiming to provide them with basic CS foundations to better grasp, contextualize, and explain the CS topics they will bring to their classrooms. This “experience report” paper describes the structure and design choices of the new disciplinary course. We propose a thematic split of the relevant topics to discuss and highlight strategies to make the course relevant for our audience. The declared and effective learning outcomes are then analyzed, topic by topic, through crossing survey responses and exam data. We also use survey data from a year later, polling the same participants again for relevance of their learnings in the disciplinary course after being in classrooms and conducting activities in CS. Through this, success points and improvement areas of the new course as well as changes to be made for the next occurrences are identified.