Attitudes towards computer science in secondary education: Evaluation of an introductory course

Abstract

Computer science (CS) is not being taught at Czech grammar schools (15–18 years old students). In our effort to change that, we developed and piloted a basic CS course. It introduces the fundamental ideas of CS comprehensively and in relation to existing subjects and real world applications. In this paper we describe the course program briefly and present the part of evaluation that focuses on students’ point of view. We assessed how they perceive the subject of CS in context of other school subjects using a questionnaire with a qualitative and a quantitative part. It turns out that our approach to CS is considered intellectually very demanding, yet this does not seem to affect other features (interest, usefulness) too negatively. CS does not show extreme values in other measured attributes in comparison to other science subjects.