Ace 2014: The Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum: Challenge and Opportunity

The ACE conference is a fantastic conference for sharing ideas with our local CS education community. I always learn so much when I attend, and so I am particularly pleased that our paper on the new Digital Technology curriculum in Australian has been accepted for the upcoming conference in Auckland next year.

In this paper, we discuss the proposed new national curriculum for primary and secondary schools in Australia, and in particular, the proposal for the Digital Technology curriculum which incorporates the teaching of computational thinking and programming from the beginning of primary school. This is a fantastic development, but one that also represents many new challenges for us as a community. In the second half of the paper, we present a review of CS Education research in relation to F-12 teaching, identifying key research areas, and areas where we will need to expand our research in order to support this new curriculum and similar initiatives in other countries.

K. Falkner, R. Vivian and N. Falkner, The Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum: Challenge and Opportunity. Accepted for the Sixteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, 20th-23rd January, 2014.

Update: Congratulations to the CSER team for having their paper receive a commendation at the conference!