engleski

Students' attitudes towards programming after the first year of implementing a new informatics curriculum in the elementary schools

Programming is a highly wanted occupation in the market. There is a need for lowering the age level for learning programming in education in order to develop students' digital literacy but also digital fluency. There are a worldwide trend and many initiatives for lowering the age for learning programming resulting in implementing new computing curriculums in many countries. The Republic of Croatia is one of the countries which changed the informatics curriculum, starting with the 2018/2019 school year. One of the most significant modifications in the curriculum is that informatics is now a mandatory course for fifth and sixth graders in elementary school. Programming is also included in more lectures, making it one of the most represented topics in the new curriculum. The basis for programming lectures is the spiral curriculum form, which includes repeating the concepts of previous years with the addition of new ones. After the first year of implementing the curriculum, we decided to survey fifth and sixth grade elementary school children that were the first generation taught by the new curriculum. The survey included 936 students from several cities in Croatia. We present the result of the research in this paper.

curriculum ; informatics ; programming ; elementary school ; attitudes

Book Series: ICERI Proceedings