Abstract:

There is an increasing demand for people with skills in informatics to fill various positions in societies. Therefore, in many countries, informatics is taught in upper secondary schools, but different countries have chosen different paths for integrating informatics into school curricula. At the end of 2019, Estonia had developed a new innovative curriculum. This paper aims to examine how the new curriculum of informatics for Estonian upper secondary schools was developed. Action research was chosen as the method to investigate the development of the new informatics curriculum. The process of creating the curriculum is described here to understand why this approach was chosen, what kind of challenges had to be overcome and how implementation has started in Estonian schools.

The action research consisted of five stages. The process started in autumn 2017. The first stage was the elaboration of principles for the new informatics curriculum. Nine stakeholders, including teachers, school leaders, representatives of universities and the information technology (IT) sector, discussed different models and the model for the development of the curriculum was selected based on a survey. The second stage was the creation of the curriculum concept. The development team consisted of 12 members, including teachers, school leaders, representatives of universities and the information technology (IT) sector, and they tried to make the informatics curriculum as practical as possible. The focus was on using the curriculum to help upper secondary school students understand the diversity of the IT sector, which would in turn aid them in making better choices for their future careers. At the end of the second stage, a curriculum had been created with five elective courses for students to choose from. These courses included “Programming”, “Software development”, “User-centred design and prototyping”, “Software analyses and testing”, and “Digital services”. After completing these courses, students had to work in teams, with each of them having a function and a role in developing their own project. During the third stage of the action research, learning materials were created in cooperation with experts from three universities and ten upper-secondary schools. 11 teachers took part in the third stage which included 22 cohorts of students. The development of the course materials was an agile process in which the participating teachers from pilot schools provided regular comments on the materials. The fourth stage was getting feedback from students and teachers. In that stage, feedback from 223 students and 11 teachers of the ten pilot schools was collected using questionnaires. That feedback was used to improve the course materials where needed. The fifth stage of the action research was the completion of the learning materials based on the feedback of reviewers, four experts-teachers and four experts from universities, and representatives of the IT sector. Based on that feedback, the last changes to the materials were implemented and the courses were finalized.

The current paper describes the process of the development of the informatics curriculum, and also gives an overview of the problems and questions that arose during this process. The Estonian experience could provide an opportunity for other countries to modernize their informatics education.

Keywords:

Teaching informatics, curriculum development, computer science, action research.