Secondly, we should return to Jean Piaget's constructivism. The Swiss developmental psychologist strongly believed that children's development and learning emerged from their personal interaction with their environment, and that pupils should independently and actively create meanings and connections. Computer science lessons are absolutely perfect for constructivist learning!
Rooted in history
Few people know that the origins of computer science date back more than 5,000 years. Who’s aware that 'digital' means presenting information as a sequence of symbols? The first major step in digitisation was the invention of the first writings thousands of years ago. Along with the first writings, the need for data security emerged – a topic which is so central nowadays.
Teaching computer science through this historical dimension is key as today’s children will be tomorrow’s critical users or even contributors to the future development of digital technology. What’s more, the historical perspective allows understanding computer science in the context of the whole science, which promotes basic language and mathematics skills. We therefore use this approach in "Einfach Informatik", our series of teaching resources for the 5th-9th grades. Here children and adolescents learn not only how to apply the concepts, but also how to develop their own solutions and improve the concepts. Which all creates a sense of achievement.
The way forward
Besides the scientific and didactic aspects, there is of course a political dimension to computer science teaching. Convincing society that it was necessary to introduce a new subject – even an attractive and essential one – was no easy task. Convincing pupils, teachers, parents and politicians that it was imperative to teach computer science was a long, arduous process. Now we must consider in which direction computer science teaching is to develop. The question is: Who takes care that we do not merely teach to reflect the use of digital technology, instead that we teach to control and to further develop it?
I hope that children and young people will not only be taught how to use digital technologies. This is an important aspect, but
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in my opinion
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not the central one.
