How Do Swedish Primary Teachers Introduce Programming in Their Classrooms, and What Strategies Are Used?
Anna Åkerfeldt, Linda Mannila, Susanne Kjällander, Fredrik Heintz · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · 2025
Programming was introduced in the Swedish national curriculum (grades 1–9) in 2017, requiring all teachers in two subjects—mathematics and technology—to teach programming starting in fall 2018. The study presented in this article is part of a longitudinal research project on programming education in two primary schools in Sweden. This article focuses on data collected through classroom observations conducted from 2019 to 2021, specifically on teacher introductions of programming activities in grades 1–8. A total of 383 minutes of introductions have been observed and analyzed through (1) a design for learning perspective, combined with (2) the Scratch computational thinking framework. The analysis has shed light on how teachers introduce programming in practice and identified three strategies used: explorative, structured, and systematic. Furthermore, our findings suggest that teachers primarily introduce programming using existing online resources, which are utilized in various ways depending on the strategy employed. While a teacher using an explorative strategy tends to outsource the teaching to resources, a teacher with a systematic strategy integrates and facilitates a discussion with students using resources as support. The same teacher can, however, employ different strategies depending on, for instance, the grade level or the topic to be covered. Our results highlight several key areas that require further investigation from both research and educational perspectives.