Student-directed projects--projects in which students have individual control over what they create and how to create it--are a promising practice for supporting the development of conceptual understanding and personal interest in K-12 computer science classrooms. In this article, we explore a central (and perhaps counterintuitive) design…

Objectives: The goal of this paper is to introduce and describe a new introductory computer science course. Research results from the implementation of this curriculum will be presented to demonstrate the nature of teachers' experiences with the curriculum. Participants: Participants are teachers implementing the new curriculum at two schools in…

Enabling students to recognize and evaluate the ubiquitous impact of computing technology on society is an internationally proclaimed goal of a K-12 computing education. To that end, students need to actually engage with their computing knowledge in concrete everyday situations. From the perspectives of learning transfer and variation theory, we…

Literature on global employability signifies "enabling" learning environments where students encounter ill-formed and open-ended problems and are required to adapt and be creative. Varying forms of "projects," co-located and distributed, have populated computing curricula for decades and are generally deemed an answer to this…

Computer science as a school subject in France is characterized by a succession of promising starts that have not yet been transformed into perennial solutions. The main goal of this article is to analyze this complex situation from a historical perspective, and describe the current rebirth of an optional Computer Science course in the last year…

In this article, we examine the use of electronic textiles (e-textiles) for introducing key computational concepts and practices while broadening perceptions about computing. The starting point of our work was the design and implementation of a curriculum module using the LilyPad Arduino in a pre-AP high school computer science class. To…

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…