How to convince teachers to teach computer science even if informatics was never a part of their own studies
Juraj Hromkovic̆, Regula Lacher · Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science · 2017
Computer science is becoming a common, mandatory subject in curricula of educational systems in ever more countries. The implementation is everything, but simple. Computer science is the only subject that teachers of primary schools have to teach, but never studied themselves. The widely spread, but wrong idea that computer science is about using a computer or about working with social media makes this process still more complicated, with the risk that the next generation of teachers also does not get proper training. In this article, we show how to explain the goals of computer science education to the teachers in such a way that they understand the contributions of computer science to the understanding of the world and to the growth of intellectual abilities of their pupils, and that they focus on teaching fundamental, and therefore stable concepts of informatics instead of operating instructions for short-term applications. The following text is an explanation and an oer to teachers who are experienced in teaching, but do not have any idea what computer science is about, except that it has “something to do with computers.”