Difficulties in teaching programming at the level of early school education - the teachers' perspective

The paper presents the results of the research conducted in 2018 among 240 randomly selected teachers from the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Voivodeship. It aimed at recognizing the main barriers and difficulties that teachers face while implementing the elements of computational thinking and coding into IT education in grades I-III. Such changes have been introduced recently into the primary school curriculum by the Ministry of Education in Poland. The data collected from the surveys and the individual interviews allowed for identifying the main problems, among which the lack of experience and limited access to educational materials are the most commonly listed. The participants of the research study were also supposed to take the test aimed at verifying their general knowledge of IT tools as well as their programming skills. While the first one could be assessed as satisfactory the level of the later was much lower than expected. During the interviews, the teachers also complained that activities such as planning, analyzing and constructing exercises corresponding with the level of children's maturity are time-consuming. Relatively high number of students in the classes and insufficient infrastructure also do not help to ease the problem