CS in Schools published paper

20 April 2020

We recently published a peer reviewed paper describing our work at CS in Schools in 2019. The paper just appeared in the proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE’20). Only 28% of submitted papers were accepted, so we’re both proud and excited that our important work at CS in Schools was accepted for publication.

The front page of our recently published paper in the ITiCSE’20 conference in Trondheim, Norway. Only around 28% of papers were accepted into this peer-reviewed conference.

You can download the paper here. We want the paper distributed as widely as possible, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 License. Feel free to share!

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Digital technology is compulsory in schools in most states at most year levels in Australia. However, a recent survey of over 400 Australian schools in 2019 found that 96% have had difficulty hiring qualified technology teachers and 39% of schools have reduced the amount of technology education they offer. We have observed that there is a shortage of teachers who feel qualified to teach coding.

To address this problem, we launched CS in Schools, a successful in-class professional development programme for teachers that helps schools build a robust digital technology capability in their students. Our programme matches pedagogy with content expertise, by matching a volunteer computing professional with a secondary school teacher, and helping that teacher develop their coding skills in the classroom over a six month period. This experience paper describes the approach we took in piloting our programme with 10 teachers in 8 schools who taught over 1,100 students in 2019. We also describe our current scale-up in 2020 to work with around 60 teachers, around 40 volunteers, over 25 schools, and more than 6,000 students. Our goal is to work with hundreds of schools in 2021.

The paper can be cited as follows:

Hugh E. Williams, Selina Williams, and Kristy Kendall. 2020. CS in Schools: Developing a Sustainable Coding Programme in Australian Schools. In 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE’20), June 15–19, 2020, Trondheim, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3341525.3387422

If you take a read, we’d love to hear what you think!