Resources and textbooks for computer science education in French primary schools

Isabelle Vandevelde (1) , Cédric Fluckiger (1, 2) , Sandra Nogry (3, 4)

1 Théodile-CIREL
2 CIREL - Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en Education de Lille - ULR 4354
3 CY - CY Cergy Paris Université
4 PARAGRAPHE - Laboratoire Paragraphe

This article examines a corpus of texts that define the scope and objectives of computer science (CS education at primary school level in France, including textbooks, curricula, and institutional documents. Faced with these new programs, and in the absence of any specific training on methods for teaching computer science, teachers have had to make do by relying on a disparate set of documents ranging from prescriptive and guidance texts, official directives and curricula, institutional documents, textbooks, and other books. This article provides an analysis of these documents from a computer science pedagogy perspective with the aim of exploring how they change and evolve through the grades of education. We begin with a transversal analysis to highlight changes in the content taught from one cycle to the next. Then, we focus on how a specific notion, the notion of loop, is introduced to students, in order to characterise how the same notion is formulated and evolves across the different textbooks. In this way, we show that loops are defined differently across textbooks, using vocabulary that is increasingly precise and connected to other areas of knowledge, without being always connected to the digital field.

Mots clés: textbooks; computer science; digital; primary school

Domaines: Education

Isabelle Vandevelde, Cédric Fluckiger, Sandra Nogry. Resources and textbooks for computer science education in French primary schools. IARTEM e-journal, 2022, 14 (1), ⟨10.21344/iartem.v14i1.954⟩. ⟨hal-03822572⟩