Abstract:

The current skilled employees lack in technical professions, including computer science, should be counteracted by developing suitable early education actions. Early technology education offers children and later adolescents the opportunity to discover their enthusiasm and interest in technology and incorporate it into their personal learning path.

Motivated by the expected shortage of highly qualified technicians, the present research is concerned with the development of a competence-based framework with activity templates for kindergartens for early technology education in computer science. The scientifically founded framework for the target group considering didactic aspects should serve as a basis to playfully introduce children to technology, in particular computer science, and the activities of a scientist.

The development process comprises six phases. The first phase deals with guiding themes, learning outcomes and competences in the framework. Phase two involves the extraction of tasks from the empirical study carried out. The consolidation of the tasks in content dimensions and activity clusters is the content of the third process phase. In phase four an activity map is developed, phase five serves to match tasks to learning outcomes. In the last phase, phase six, the framework is finalized.

The basis for the competence-based framework comes firstly from a literature research and secondly from the experiences of the authors from preliminary studies. Building up on task drafts, numerous concrete tasks in two kindergartens were performed. Qualitative content analysis according to Mayring is used for deriving the activity templates and finalizing the framework.

Keywords:

Early technology education, computer science, competence-based education.