During the last few decades, there has been a growing need for Professional Development of in-service teachers in Computer Science. This paper presents a systematic mapping of the research in this area published between 2010 and 2020. The study’s goal is to map existing literature, understanding how research is evolving and identifying gaps that can prompt new research. The literature mapping is based on the analysis of 206 articles collected from various online databases, then selected according to defined inclusion/exclusion criteria. The study investigates the type of intervention/study, school level, geographical location, connection to curricula, learning objectives, phase of the research, size of the study, and type of collaboration. From the literature mapping, Professional Development of in-service teachers of Computer Science emerges as a rapidly growing and dynamic research area. However, some threats are connected to fragmentation of the research and the need for more cooperation to increase inclusiveness and international collaboration.

Learning to program is often reported as challenging. Difficulties might be connected to, e.g., acquisition of core concepts like iteration, specific language constructs, and program design. Additionally, mastery of a programming language’s constructs does not consequently translate into solving new programming problems. These challenges have to be taken into account in the context of in-service teachers’ professional development (PD). In this paper, we address challenges teachers face when learning to program, considering these closely related questions: What do teachers perceive as difficult and how does this impact the perception of challenges their students will face? How does this influence the perception of teaching programming? The paper is based on the analysis of 178 reflection notes delivered by in-service teachers attending a university-level course on programming to identify issues related to the research questions. Out of the topics that we have selected from the literature as challenging for newcomers, the most difficult ones for teachers seem to be writing code and pseudocode to solve a specific problem. The easiest ones are understanding variable initialization and if statements. Also, teachers express that pupils will struggle with many aspects of programming and point to the complexity and students’ misconceptions inherent in several programming concepts such as loops. Our results suggest that it is not necessarily difficult to learn to program if in-service teachers are given paid time to learn.

The transition from traditional to digital teaching has led to several challenges for students and educators under the COVID-19 pandemic. Most universities are experiencing remote online delivery and assessment for the first time, which creates several issues, particularly for delivering courses efficiently and evaluating the outcomes without students compromising academic integrity. In this study, we take a closer look at a cross-campus case in delivering a programming course that switched to digital teaching due to COVID-19. We focus on the transition in assessment forms and the gradual adaptation to portfolio evaluation over two years. This form of assessment is more aligned with the constructive alignment theory, and hence contribute to increased learning outcomes as the students receive feedback along the way. Furthermore, we introduced a task where students had to reflect on the answers and solutions. This reflection note may help the teacher to better understand to which level the student has actually understood the theories and skills applied in the solution, and hence reassure that the solution is produced by the student. Observations from our data provide promising direction that it can increase learning benefits and reduce possibilities or the need for cheating and contributes to increased learning outcomes. However, this form of assessment requires a significant effort from teachers and is both time and resource consuming.

Code reuse is a widely accepted practice in software engineering. Not surprisingly, the practice is becoming more and more widespread also in the context of computing education. This paper explores the use of code reuse in secondary education, focusing on the challenges that are connected to formative assessment. The paper presents the results of an interview study with 12 teachers teaching computing in secondary schools. Teachers have been asked about their attitudes towards code reuse in education, challenges with formative assessment and code reuse, and best practices to address the identified challenges. The study shows that attitude and approaches towards code reuse in the classroom span wide. Some teachers are open and positive to include it as a practice, while others are more restrictive. Most of the reported challenges revolve around the dilemma between learners reusing code to be efficient and create complex programs, but at the expense of adequately learning and understanding what they do and practicing general and specific programming skills. The paper also presents some lessons learned that can be directly relevant for educators. some lessons learned that can be directly relevant for educators.

This paper presents and evaluates a model of project-based learning (PjBL) to train in-service teachers of programming. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge around in-service teachers' training to meet the growing demand for teachers being prepared to teach programming in different subjects and school levels. The aim is to design a course that prepares teachers to teach programming, is relevant, and increases their self-efficacy. To contribute to this, we suggest a PjBL approach where teachers create a teaching plan during a project. Teachers may bring in their disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy combined with traditional and instructional methods to design an artifact that can be used directly in their practice. In the proposed model, teachers' projects act as a bridge between training and practice. We implemented the first version of the model in 2019 and used this experience to revise the model described in this paper. The results show that teachers are mainly satisfied with this form of PjBL. Many are favorable to this approach and express joy in teaching programming as they feel prepared and, at the same time, understand that programming can be demanding to learn and teach. Therefore, they are also mentally prepared for what is to come.