Reimagining CS Courses for High School Students
Julie M. Smith, Bryan Twarek, Monica M. McGill · 2024
Traditionally, computer science (CS) in the United States has been an elective subject at the high school level. In recent years, however, some school systems have created a CS graduation requirement. Designing a required CS course that meets the needs of anticipated future advancements in the field necessitates exploring the research question, What computing content do high school teachers, college instructors, and computing industry professionals prioritize in a required computer science course for high school students? To better understand what these different groups perceive to be the essential content of a foundational high school CS course, we conducted a series of focus groups. These focus groups explored participants' (n = 21) thinking about what content would be most important to prioritize in a required high school CS course. Transcripts of the focus groups were abductively coded and then analyzed to determine what CS content priorities were identified and what disagreements about priorities exist.