The CECE report: Creating a map of informatics in European schools

Recent years have seen an increase in activities geared towards making Computer Science courses available to all K-12 students. However, due to administrative regulations, such activities and their implementation often need to be localized on a national or even local context; these constraints, often paired with subtle but important terminology differences, hinder those wanting to compare the status quo across the boundaries of administrative units and to draw on experiences made elsewhere. To address this, we plan to publicize the data, findings, and recommendations of the 2017 report “Informatics Education in Europe: Are We All In The Same Boat?” [3] and to engage the community in a discussion. This report was produced by the Committee on European Computing Education (CECE), a committee jointly established by ACM Europe and Informatics Europe in 2014. The report summarizes the status quo of teaching Computer Science (or, as Europeans would say: Informatics) and Digital Literacy in school and the status quo of corresponding teacher training. Being similar in thrust to previous reports [2, 4], its scope is widened to include a large number of different educational systems. In this, the report follows up on the earlier “boat report” by Gander et al. [1] and provides extensive data coverage across Europe (including Israel). While data was gathered from 55 administrative units (countries, nations, and regions) across Europe, we believe that the report is of interest to non-European policy-makers, researches, and educators. The report shows the difficulties of introducing mandatory curricula even in countries with a long tradition of teaching Informatics in secondary school; discussions about this are in part impeded by terminology issues which the report intends to clarify. Also, it makes a universal case for breaking the vicious circle of a shortage of Informatics classes and a shortage of Informatics teachers and advises against hiring teachers that have not been exposed to a proper subject-matter and didactic training. As part of the session, we will introduce the interactive web-map (http://cece-map.informatics-europe.org) designed during this project. This map can be used to visualize the data collected and to compare the status quo relative to a given region of interest.