Teaching programming for secondary school : a pedagogical content knowledge based approach

The general research aim of this thesis is to understand what the PCK of CS for secondary school is, with a special focus on the subject "programming", being programming one of the core subjects of CS. Knowledge of PCK will then be used to assess the Dutch situation, with special focus on Dutch CS textbooks and Dutch teachers. The final aim is to find tailor made solutions for the Dutch CS scenario, where CS risks to disappear from the secondary school curriculum due to several problems. Among the problems evidenced: most Dutch teachers have no solid disciplinary background, being mostly teachers from other disciplines re-trained to teach CS. To support these teachers ad hoc solution, it is necessary to understand the PCK of CS. To do so a preparatory literature study reveals to what extent the PCK of programming has been explored. Because no real effort to portray such knowledge has been done in CS before, an exploratory study has been designed and conducted with expert CS teachers in order to unveil this knowledge. With the knowledge about PCK gathered through this exploratory study, the PCK of textbooks and teachers in the Dutch scenario is evaluated.