This paper presents a systematic literature review of professional development programs in computational thinking (CT). CT has emerged as an essential set of skills that everyone should develop to participate in a global society. However, there were no pre-service or in-service teacher programs to integrate CT into the K-12 classrooms until very…

Those working toward equitable K-12 computing education in the United States have always had their work cut out for them: understanding how best to teach, developing robust curricula, designing novel tools, building teacher capacity, and supporting systemic change in schools to bring equitable computing education to young people. Collectively,…

Objectives: Computer Science (CS) education has become increasingly prevalent in elementary schools because of multiple rationales, such as the importance of computational literacy and the growing demand for CS-related workforce preparation. As elementary CS standards continue to be adopted by many states, more examples and voices from the field…

It is widely believed that there are educational benefits to making computer games, but there is no systematic review of research on this topic. This article describes a meta-synthesis of research on children designing and programming computer games that investigates the extent to which there is evidence of benefits for computer science learning…

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as…

This article tells a story of K-12 computer science in two different countries. These two countries differ profoundly in culture, language, government and state structure, and in their education systems. Despite these differences, however, they share the pursuit of excellence and high standards in K-12 education. In Israel, curriculum is…

This article describes the construction process and evaluation of the Agile Constructionist Mentoring Methodology (ACMM), a mentoring method for guiding software development projects in the high school. The need for such a methodology has arisen due to the complexity of mentoring software project development in the high school. We introduce the…

At schools special learning and programming environments are often used in the field of algorithms. Particularly with regard to computer science lessons in secondary education, they are supposed to help novices to learn the basics of programming. In several parts of Germany (e.g., Bavaria) these fundamentals are taught as early as in the seventh…