Computer Studies and Computer Technology Curriculum Refresh – Preliminary Research

Many of you have likely heard that the Ministry of Education has announced that they want to update the curriculum [link] as well as “improve coding and computational skills for all students as part of their plan to create jobs, grow our economy, and help people in their everyday lives” [link].

In anticipation of this, ACSE (Association for Computer Studies Educators) would like to start collecting some preliminary feedback to form our input to the Ministry of Education for when they formally announce the process.

You will find the form for your input here.

Some comments about the form:

  • The information is being used to advise ACSE (http://www.acse.net) on their recommendations to the Ministry of Education on the review of the Computer Studies (ICS2O, ICS3C, ICS3U, ICS4C, ICS4U) and Computer Technology (TEJ2O, TEJ3E, TEJ3M, TEJ4E, TEJ4M) curriculum documents.
  • Your personal information (name and email address) will be kept confidential and will not be included in the aggregate data that we compile.
  • You’ll see that we are asking about K-8, even though there isn’t a K-8 CS-related curriculum. This is intended to gather teachers’ thoughts on whether or not CS (or Computational Thinking) should be formally addressed in K-8.
  • Please understand that the intent of this research is to gather some initial feedback. It is not being gathered as a specific request by the Ministry of Education or because a new curriculum cycle For Computer Studies or Technological Education has been announced.
  • If you want to submit feedback in multiple areas or provide multiple comments, you can use the form more than once. This would be preferable to including multiple paragraphs as one response.

We’re not putting a hard deadline on this form at this time, but we’d probably like to start aggregating the results in about a month, so around the end of November. If you could provide a response by that time it would be appreciated.