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Launching Swiss Computer Science Education Week

Published: 09 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The systemic introduction of computer science education in federalist countries such as the United States, Germany, and Switzerland can be extremely difficult. The lack of top down dissemination mechanisms makes it hard to scale up even successful Computer Science Education strategies to national levels, necessitating bottom up approaches. High profile initiatives such as Computer Science EducationWeek, including the Hour of Code tutorials, provide an alternate route to reaching potentially large numbers of students, but in international contexts require proper adaptation to local languages and cultures. In 2014, Scalable Game Design Switzerland launched the Swiss computer science education Week featuring a multi-lingual "Frogger 3D" game creation activity. Results show the power of this bottom up approach to help jump-start student exposure to computer science in a relatively short amount of time. The first Swiss Computer Science EducationWeek reached 10,000 Swiss students, from 21 out of 26 Swiss cantons, with qualitative feedback and quantitative retention data indicating a sustainable and enjoyable experience for students and teachers.

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A. R. Basawapatna, A. Repenning, and K. H. Koh. Closing the cyberlearning loop: Enabling teachers to formatively assess student programming projects. In In Proc. of ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE '15, pp 12--17,New York, NY, USA, 2015. ACM.
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A. Repenning, D. C. Webb, K. H. Koh, et al. Scalable game design: A strategy to bring systemic computer science education to schools through game design and simulation creation. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 15(2):11, 2015.
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Cited By

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  • (2021)Investigating Creative and Critical Engagement with Computing in the Hour of Code (Practical Report)Proceedings of the 16th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3481312.3481314(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2021)A systematic review of “Hour of Code” researchComputer Science Education10.1080/08993408.2021.202236233:4(512-544)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2021
  • (2017)The Solothurn ProjectProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3059009.3059017(218-223)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2017
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WiPSCE '15: Proceedings of the Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education
November 2015
149 pages
ISBN:9781450337533
DOI:10.1145/2818314
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 November 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Broadening participation
  2. cyberlearning
  3. distance learning
  4. multilingualism
  5. national education system

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WiPSCE '15

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Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 279 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Investigating Creative and Critical Engagement with Computing in the Hour of Code (Practical Report)Proceedings of the 16th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education10.1145/3481312.3481314(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2021)A systematic review of “Hour of Code” researchComputer Science Education10.1080/08993408.2021.202236233:4(512-544)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2021
  • (2017)The Solothurn ProjectProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3059009.3059017(218-223)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2017
  • (2017)Employing Retention of Flow to Improve Online TutorialsProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3017680.3017799(63-68)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2017
  • (2016)Piloting Computer Science Education Week in MexicoProceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education10.1145/2839509.2844598(431-436)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2016
  • (2016)Retention of FlowProceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education10.1145/2839509.2844597(633-638)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2016
  • (2016)Computational thinking tools2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VLHCC.2016.7739688(218-222)Online publication date: Sep-2016

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