Teaching The Teachers To Teach Programming : On Course Design and Didactic Concepts

Involving computer programming in primary and secondary school is an urgent issue in many countries, and in Sweden this should be rapidly implemented during 2018. First subjects that should implement programming in the teaching and learning activities are mathematics and technology. Some teachers have earlier experiences of programming, but for many primary and secondary school teachers programming is a new discipline. The aim of this paper is to describe and discuss how requirements have been gathered and implemented in a course for teacher training on programming for mathematics and technology in K-12 education. The study was carried out as two phases of a development process inspired by design science. In the first phase requirements were gathered and discussed in a brainstorming workshop were the course developers tried to align learning outcomes with didactic ideas. In the second phase the requirements from the first phase were implemented in the actual course development. Conclusions are that the idea of teaching the teachers needs a different course outline than how traditional design of programming courses. Higher education have a tradition of training students for system development in the industry. Teacher training should have a focus on didactic concepts that later could be reused in courses on mathematics and technology in K-12 settings. Examples of such didactic concepts are, computational thinking, pair programming, visualisation and game-based learning