Standards for higher secondary education for computer science in Germany

Abstract

In this paper we will report on the Standards for Higher Secondary Education for Computer Science in Germany. After the first results of the PISA-studies in Germany the administration in the central and the federal states switched standards and curricula from setting teaching aims and cognitive learning objectives to describing students’ learning outcome with practices. On the central level this work was only done for the major subjects like Mathematics, Mother Tongue, Foreign Language and Natural Science. This is a disadvantage for the other subjects in school. Therefore the German CS society—Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)—installed a working group to develop standards for higher secondary education in 2013. By the end of 2015 this group finished the task and in January 2016 the board of the GI published this academic work as the official standards in Germany for higher secondary CS education [2]. It is to be hoped that these standards will have a positive impact on the standardisation of computer science teaching in the various German federal states, just as the standards for lower secondary education had almost 10 years earlier.