Preparing teachers for the Digital Technologies curriculum: preliminary results of a pilot study

The Digital Technologies (DT) curriculum in Australia, particularly at primary school level, has been considerably expanded in the recent past from the teaching of digital literacy to the teaching of the skills necessary to create and innovate with digital technologies. The concepts of computational thinking, systems thinking and programming are part of this new curriculum. This paper presents the theoretical perspective, methodology and preliminary results of a research project, currently being run to explore different pedagogies for teacher preparation. The objective of the project is to pilot a research informed strategy for teacher preparation for the DT curriculum and articulate terms of best practice. To do so we are using as a test case a group of teachers participating in a Computer Science 4 High School (CS4HS) initiative at our institution. We hope that by sharing our experience and methodology, we can receive feedback on how to improve on the second phase of this project, and find ways to increase collaboration with other teacher educators