{"id":1064178,"date":"2022-10-13T05:23:32","date_gmt":"2022-10-13T09:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1064178"},"modified":"2022-10-13T05:23:32","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T09:23:32","slug":"a-taxonomy-of-computing-content-for-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1064178","title":{"rendered":"A taxonomy of Computing content for education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Supporting educators to provide high-quality computing education has always been integral to our mission. In 2018, we began creating more learning resources for formal education settings. The UK government had recently announced future investment in supporting computing educators. Schools in England were offering the national Computing curriculum established in 2014. (In the USA, a more common term for prescribed education content is \u2018standards\u2019.)<\/p>\n

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England\u2019s Computing curriculum requires that all learners be taught the subject between ages 5 and 16, and it consists of only 25 statements outlining expectations for learners. To accompany this curriculum, we started developing a framework to help us describe the subject of Computing, and in particular the common threads running through it.<\/p>\n

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A 2012 report by the Royal Society presented the breadth of computing by dividing it into three areas: information technology, computer science, and digital literacy. Although this goes some way to describe computing as a discipline, in our view this model creates artificial divides between aspects of the subject according to whether they are seen as more or less technical. Our more holistic view of computing recognises that concepts and skills within the subject are far more interconnected.<\/p>\n

Principles for our taxonomy<\/h2>\n

When we set out to develop our framework, the goal was to provide a way to look at and describe the subject of Computing as a set of interconnected topics; the framework doesn\u2019t define standards or curricula. There are, of course, many ways of organising the subject matter, implemented through exam specifications, textbooks, schemes of learning, and various progression guides. For our framework, we reviewed examples of each of these, from England and beyond, and decided on some organisational principles:<\/p>\n