Computational Thinking Education for In-Service Elementary Swedish Teachers : Their Perceptions and Implications for Competence Development

Many countries and governments have laid down a national strategy for digitalization in schools with the intent to strengthen both pupils' and teachers’ digital competences. Computational Thinking (CT) can be regarded as a central ingredient of teaching and learning in the XXI century and should be part of these competences. The Swedish government has recently launched a national strategy for digitalization in schools stating that CT and programming should be integrated in many school subjects. Thus, one particular challenge that needs to be addressed is the one related to teachers' competencies and skills related to programming. Since 2016, The National Agency of Education has been working together with several Swedish universities on developing academic courses in the field of CT and programming for in-service teachers. One challenge we are exploring in this paper is the one related to teachers' perceptions and competencies related to programming. As part of our on-going efforts in the course “Introduction to Programming for Elementary Teachers” offered to in-service teachers we have analyzed data we collected representing teachers´ perceptions on CT and programming before the start of the course. We applied sentiment mining and word counting on 127 texts generated by the teachers. We examine their perceptions and cluster them accordingly in order to understand how teachers perceived different aspects related to CT education. By doing so, we lay down the foundations on how to tailor competence development efforts in this field so that they fit teachers´ need. We expect these efforts will lead to the development of a model enabling to identify teachers´ current perceptions in order to plan future actions that can increase their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge