Computer Science and Schools:

A Specific Didactics?

Claudia Queiruga1(&), Claudia Banchoff Tzancoff1, Paula Venosa1,

Soledad Gómez1, and Glenda Morandi2
1
LINTI, Computer Science School, National University of La Plata,
La Plata, Argentina
{claudiaq,cbanchoff,pvenosa,sgomez}@info.unlp.edu.ar
2
School of Journalism and Social Communication,
National University of La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
glenda.morandi@presi.unlp.edu.ar

Abstract. This paper presents the curricular proposal for the “Teaching Spe-
cialization in Computer Science Didactics” of the province of Buenos Aires,
Argentina. The focus of this proposal is the training of high school teachers in
the field of Computer Science, since there is a deficit in the training in this topic
in compulsory school. The project arises in the framework of a call for national
universities with Computer Science courses, launched by Fundación Sadosky of
the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. One of the main features is
the acknowledgement of Higher Institutes for Teacher Training as referents of
excellence in ongoing teacher training. The result is the consensual design and
implementation, between these Institutes and the universities, of a curricular
program of Computer Science.

Keywords: Computer science
High school
Teaching programming

Computational thinking

1 Introduction

The inclusion of Computer Science into formal educational systems at compulsory

levels is a current and innovative topic in Argentina and the world [14].
There are multiple reasons and conditions meting its placement. On the one hand,
the great opportunities provided by technologies and software as the driving force of
economic and social development, and on the other, the need for citizens to understand
its constitutive elements and adapt and modify them to fit their needs in an ever-
connecting world, where computing is ubiquitous. Resolution 263 of the 2015 meeting
of the Federal Education Council of Argentina declared the strategic importance of the
Argentinean educational system of teaching and learning programming during com-
pulsory schooling, in order to strengthen the economic and social development of the
Nation. Simultaneously, in recent years, a set of federal initiatives and policies have
helped to consolidate a perspective that strengthens the reasons why it is necessary to
place the teaching of Computer Science as a disciplinary field. An example of this is the
emergence of educational policies, such as “Program.AR” [1], “Programa Conectar

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

P. Pesado and C. Aciti (Eds.): CACIC 2018, CCIS 995, pp. 343–351, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20787-8_24
344 C. Queiruga et al.

Igualdad”, “Plan Nacional Integral de Educación Digital” (PLANIED) [2], among

others, which allow us to situate, socially and historically, the need to think in terms of
education, development, advancement and synergy in this field. More recently, in
2017, the project “Secondary 2030” [3] approved by the Federal Council of Education
proposes to gradually incorporate a teaching approach based on transversal digital
skills and competences.
The declaration of its strategic incorporation into compulsory formal education in
Argentina makes it necessary to work in a sustained manner in the training of teachers
in conditions that lead the learning processes of Computer Science. Currently, teacher
training in this disciplinary field in the province of Buenos Aires is an area of relative
vacancy. Although some teaching training courses in Computer Science in some
universities are identified, such as those from UNICEN (National University of the
Center of the Province of Buenos Aires) and the UBA (University of Buenos Aires), it
is strategic to locate a graduate program in teaching of Computer Science which links
with the higher education system of the province and deepens tying processes between
national universities and the Higher Institutes for Teacher Training (ISFD) of the
provincial jurisdiction. In turn, the emergence of the topic in public education agendas
is characterized by the scarce references on which to base the organization of contents
and methodology on how to teach them. That is why it is essential to train teachers in
both aspects and jointly by interdisciplinary expert teams in Computer Science and
didactics.
In response to address the need, Program.ar in 2016 made a call to national uni-
versities with programs in Computer Science that were interested in designing and
implementing a specialization in teacher training in partnership with the ISFD of their
jurisdictions. Out of the universities that were nominated, 8 were selected based on the
quality of the proposals and the professional experience of their teams. In the province
of Buenos Aires the UNLa (National University of Lanús) was chosen in association
with the ISFDyT Nº 24 “Dr. Bernardo Houssay”, UNLP (National University of La
Plata) in association with Escuela Normal Superior No. 1,” Mary O. Graham”- ISFDNº
95 and UNICEN in association with ISFDyT Nº 166” José de San Martín”. The
province of Buenos Aires will have 3 proposals aimed at different recipients: a training
on the discipline and its didactics aimed at junior school level teachers (UNICEN -
ISFDyT No. 166), one aimed at high school level teachers with basic training in the
discipline or a related one such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and technology
(UNLP - ISFD No. 95), and a last one aimed at secondary level teachers with training
in other subjects, primarily in social sciences (UNLa-ISFDyT No. 24). Each of these
offers proposes a cut of contents and a particular didactic for its approach according to
the recipients of the training as well as the last beneficiaries -students- of each offer.
The remaining sections of this work are organized as follows. Section 2 discusses
the disciplinary field of Computer Science in the school, Sect. 3 describes the curricular
design of the “Teaching Specialization in Computer Science Didactics” prepared by the
authors of this work and presents the current situation in relation to the implementation
of the first cohort of the Specialization. Conclusions are presented in Sect. 4.
 Computer Science and Schools: A Specific Didactics? 345

2 The Relevance of the Disciplinary Field of Computer

Science at School

In our daily life, we are surrounded by digital objects, from the cell phone that
accompanies us all the time, traffic lights and smart homes, to drones that fly over us
and wearable technology, among other elements that are increasingly ubiquitous in our
daily lives. These elements modify our habits, our way of relating to each other, to
entertain ourselves, to study, and they enhance our cognitive abilities—that is why it is
necessary to understand what happens inside there. This reality poses a challenge in the
educational field: the training of citizens who can know, understand and operate on the
world around them, including their digital environment, placing them as critical sub-
jects and creators of innovations with digital technologies, over passivity and mere
technological consumption. That is why it is necessary that computer skills are
incorporated into the school designs of national education systems.
Computer education is currently a global concern. Countries such as New Zealand,
Estonia, Japan, Finland and the United Kingdom, among others, have updated their
school curricula including the teaching of programming in schools [4, 5]. Several states
in the United States have also implemented active policies in response to the needs of
the technology industry through the “LearnToCode” movement, led primarily by the
global code.org and codeacademy initiatives. In Argentina, over the last decades, the
use of ICT has been incorporated into educational practices at different levels of
compulsory schooling. As an example, in the province of Buenos Aires exists a new
curricular design of primary education [6], which contains a module on the inclusion of
ICT that tries to transversally incorporate the use of digital technologies in the different
curricular areas and the NTIC curricular space [7] of high school where concepts
related to the Computer Science discipline are being included. However, Computer
Science as a discipline has not yet been legitimized in the field of school education.
Although there are some cases where this is changing, the field has not yet reached the
necessary consensus for its inclusion in school curriculums at the federal level. The
technical high schools are the only ones that have training courses in Computer Sci-
ence. In this way, the study of the discipline does not occur transversally, nor is it an
integral part of the content that most students access during their time at school. The
incorporation of the computer science discipline in the school’s curricula constitutes an
achievement and the certainty of a space for the development of cognitive processes
linked to the logical reasoning that allows to predict, analyze and explain the formu-
lation of algorithms, the decomposition of problems in simpler parts, the abstraction to
handle the complexity, the generalization by means of the discovery of patterns and
similarities and, finally, the evaluation. These ideas, which identify “computational
thinking” [8, 9], are widely applied in solving problems using computers and in
understanding systems beyond the school space. In turn, the teaching and learning of
“programming” is an aspect of Information Technology that is perceived as the most
challenging in the school. That is why it is necessary for teachers to be trained in
concepts, practices and approaches to computational thinking, so that they are acces-
sible and attractive to students and fundamentally allows them to appropriate them to
understand how the digital world works and how to use this knowledge to program.
346 C. Queiruga et al.

The curricular design presented here recovers the relevance of teacher training in
the teaching and learning of Computer Science with special attention to “program-
ming”. The transversal intentionality that guides the approach of “programming” is
oriented to develop a work with the teachers that place them in the situation of getting
involved in a practice of “programming” that reflects around each one of the cognitive
processes that this development supposes. Likewise, a situated and non-abstract
approach to programming is proposed, addressing the problems of daily life that this
practice helps to solve and improve. The focus of attention is on taking advantage of
the possibilities offered by “programming” in relation to its creative uses, promoting
that the subjects overcome the condition of only consumers of software.

3 Teacher Specialization in Computer Science Didactics

3.1 Proposal
The Specialization is aimed at teachers and professionals teaching computer science in
high school. It covers both teachers of Technologies and Informatics and those who
work in the areas of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. These teachers had previous
training in topics such as propositional logic, models and abstraction, problem solving,
and use of scientific language, required as basic training for the Specialization. The first
topics to be addressed correspond to the political and pedagogical aspects that come
with the teaching of Computer Science. In this framework, issues such as the potential
and the scope of the teaching of this discipline in the current socio-historical context are
traversed by technological development and innovation in this field, highlighting the
analysis of the concept of technological sovereignty and its relations with the ideas
behind free software and proprietary software. These issues, together with the analysis
of social, political and ethical aspects linked to technology and its use in daily life make
up the foundation related to the training of digital citizenship, as well as good practices
in the safe and responsible use of data networks and digital technologies.
As mentioned in the previous section, the content of the Specialization pays special
attention to the teaching and learning of computer programming, which is why a large
number of hours are dedicated to this topic and the sense of it is transversally related to
all the modules. It starts with the most basic aspects such as the understanding and
analysis of algorithms, and ends with the development of a software project using
different computer tools. Some of them are based on block programming and others use
textual programming languages. In this sense, four modules of increasing complexity
are proposed, in which both the basic aspects of programming and sequencing, control
and abstraction structures are worked on, such as propositional logic concepts and free
software developments. During the first year of the Specialization, aspects related to the
internal functioning of computers and the role of operating systems are also developed,
and in the second year the fundamental concepts on data networks are worked on.
These topics are addressed not only from the theoretical point of view of their operation
but also with practical activities that promote the use of resources available in schools:
computer rooms, educational robots, netbooks and/or smart phones and tablets.
 Computer Science and Schools: A Specific Didactics? 347

The approach of these subjects applied to two practices will allow to form graduates
that can design, coordinate and evaluate innovative didactic situations focused on the
development of computational thought and to incorporate, in the educational practices,
a focus on programming that recovers strategies favoring processes of creation of
applications and digital contents.
This approach promotes the exchange with teachers of different disciplinary areas
of the school curriculum, in the search for a linkage between computational thinking
strategies and their teaching and learning processes.

3.2 Articulation with ISFD

The proposal of the Specialization recognizes the ISFDs as referents for excellence in
continuous teacher training, and national universities with programs in Computer
Science as the creators of specific knowledge of the field. That is why the teaching
specialization presented here responds to the need to create sustainable teacher training
devices by linking both institutions. Likewise, the development of the Specialization
was conceived in terms of adaptation to the needs and possibilities of the jurisdiction in
which it is subscribed. In the case of our proposal, it was developed in association with
Escuela Normal Superior No. 1, “Mary O. Graham” - ISFD No.95 and is aimed at high
school level teachers with training in the discipline, or in related subjects such as
mathematics, physics and chemistry.

3.3 Teaching Methodology

The implementation of the development of the curriculum of the Specialization forced
the team to rethink the ways of teaching each one develops daily, in our role as
teachers. In this sense, interdisciplinary accompanied the process, given that the team is
composed of professionals from Computer Science, Education and Communication
Sciences. The project proposes to teach from a specific didactics the contents of
Computer Science, aimed at teachers in the secondary level. These teachers may or
may not have computer training and may or may not have pedagogical training in the
field, which was a great challenge. Our proposal aims to teach something potentially
unknown and those who know it may not have the tools to teach it. The decision was
based on the consensus of the work team that aims to break apart from some classroom
work dynamics that do not strengthen the development of computational thinking, but
rather promote work practices conducive to the development of technological knowl-
edge from a purely instrumental perspective. Problem-based learning and the inquiry-
based work methodology [10] proved to be coherent options to enhance work with
technologies and promote production practices with them.
The methodology of work proposed by problem-based learning (PBL), closely
linked to new perspectives on the teaching of Computer Science [11], solves the
problem of teaching with certain difficulties, as we are concerned about ignorance on
the proposed topics. In this sense, for the team, this form of classroom work forced us
again to rethink the ways in which knowledge is produced and the cognitive processes
that it aims to help produce. The teachers, in most cases, will be faced with the
challenge of knowing the technology and its possibilities, although the concern of the
348 C. Queiruga et al.

team lies in the possibilities of resignifying it and putting it into practice. From this
perspective it would seem that the concern of the work team is the mere use and
application. However the starting point is the belief that in the stages of a critical
process of appropriation of knowledge it is necessary first to know and then transform
into praxis [12]. Returning to the ABP methodology, its incorporation into the different
proposals of the curriculum was linked to the path students take from the original
approach of the problem to its solution. The collaborative work in small groups enables
the students to share in that learning experience the possibility of practicing and
developing skills, of observing and reflecting on attitudes and values that could hardly
be put into action in the conventional expository method. In this sense, we agree with
Guevara Mora [13] when she explains that “the work experience in a small group
oriented to the solution of the problem is one of the distinguishing characteristics of
PBL. In these group activities, the students take responsibilities and actions that are
basic in their formative process”.
Inquiry, central and constitutive practice of the PBL, is strongly linked to tech-
nological development as it is increasingly favored by access to information and the era
of flows. The students recognize themselves in these practices because they are con-
stitutive of their daily technological uses, which strengthen their capacities to inquire,
investigate and create. It is important to understand that this capacity for creation and
discovery defined as inquiry is the basis for the development of critical and meaningful
thought processes. Understanding this in a broad way allows us to conceive technology
as a possibility and a fundamental tool, not only because of the current context that
surrounds us and conditions it, but because of the access to knowledge and the net-
works that it generates. To be able to think the way in which, for what and why
teaching Computer Science constitutes a daily challenge for this team, which considers
that technologies cross us and condition our ways of living, therefore their approach in
formal education must be ensured, not only in the curriculum but from the promotion
of creation with technologies.

3.4 Curricular Organization

The program is structured in ten modules, with a workload of 320 h of disciplinary
modules and 80 h of teaching practice located, with two semesters in each year. The
modules that make up the curriculum are articulated around three areas of knowledge,
which make it possible to group specific teaching objects of Computer Science, and
develop them gradually in levels of increasing complexity, starting from a sequence
that is articulated with the learning processes that students of high schools are expected
to develop.
The delimited knowledge areas are:
• Computer Science, digital citizenship and education, which includes the modules
“Pedagogical-political framework of the teaching of Computer Science” and “Safe
and responsible use of technology and Internet services”.
• Architecture, operating systems and networks in secondary education, which
includes the modules “Computers and operating systems”, “Data networks and
Internet” and “Situated Professional Practice I”.
 Computer Science and Schools: A Specific Didactics? 349

• Programming and its teaching, which includes the modules “The algorithm as an
object of learning and form of organization of thought”, “The teaching of pro-
gramming through visual languages”, “The teaching of programming in real soft-
ware production languages with special attention to free software”, “The process of
teaching the development of a software project” and “Situated Professional
Practice II”.
This curricular organization offers an axis of supervised practical training - Situated
Practice I and Situated Practice II -, which takes place in two different curricular spaces,
in each one of which the students elaborate a project or teaching design in which they
must include the strategies and content addressed in the program. Table 1 summarizes
the organization of the program in 2 years.

Table 1. Organization of the program into years.

First year
Pedagogical- The algorithm as an Computers and The teaching of
political framework object of learning and operating systems programming
of the teaching of form of organization of (40 hs.) through block-
Computer Science thought (30 hs.) based visual
(30 hs.) languages (50 hs.)
Situated Professional Practice I (30 hs.)
Second year
Data Networks and The teaching of The process of Safe and
Internet (40 hs.) programming in real teaching the responsible use of
software production development of a technology and
languages with special software project Internet services
attention to free (40 hs.) (40 hs.)
software (50 hs.)
Situated Professional Practice II (50 hs.)

3.5 Implementation of the Specialization

The specialization here presented has been approved by the General Council of Culture
and Education of the province of Buenos Aires in March 2018 and has a resolution by
the General Director of Culture and Education of the province. This resolution
establishes the beginning of its implementation in the year 2018, to a closed cycle, and
the provision of points to the teachers who complete the program. It is currently in the
process of being implemented, and for this reason, a good teacher-student relationship
is being considered in each of the modules, given that the activities will focus mainly
on workshops methodologies. Likewise, attention will be paid to the follow-up of the
development of the modules, in order to encourage retention, propitiating the com-
pletion of the training. The aim is that this federal training policy can act as soon as
possible in the training of our adolescents during their high school years. The faculty of
the specialization comprises specialists in the disciplinary field and teachers in the area
of communication and education for modules that require a clear understanding of the
policies that accompany the development of the discipline in the field of education.
350 C. Queiruga et al.

4 Conclusions

The development of this specialization is the result of an interdisciplinary work in

which a team composed of teachers from UNLP and ISFD No. 95 of La Plata coor-
dinated effort and experience in a work that covers an area of vacancy in teacher
training.
State plans and programs, such as Schools of the Future of PLANIED, which
among its initiatives propose to distribute technological resources in Argentinean
schools, require specific training to promote significant learning, placing students as
creators of digital artifacts. In addition, teachers and managers are inquired by these
new materials and require training such as that presented in this paper that allows them
to organize and plan their activities with these technologies that add to the classroom
space.
It is relevant to recover that the Specialization in Didactics of Computer Sciences
presented in this paper is promoted by a federal program, which in turn promoted the
implementation of seven other specializations oriented to teacher training in Computer
Science in the school setting, to be taught in other provinces of the country during the
year 2018. This speaks of a federal perspective in relation to the teaching and learning
of Computer Science in compulsory schooling, resulting in a great advance in relation
to the inclusion of Computer Science in the classroom. It also proposes a starting point
for the reformulation of the curricular contents of compulsory schooling in the
Argentine educational system.

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