The Comparative Survey of Computer Science and Programming Education for Primary and Secondary Schools in the UK, Australia and USA

Abstract

In this paper, we review the national curricula for primary and secondary schools in the UK, Australia and USA, and report on their contents and features. The ICT education in these three advanced countries is defined in terms of certain key goals, e.g., abstraction, problem solving, algorithms, data, evaluation, collaboration, etc. These are based on computational thinking, and include programming education as a part of the curriculum. In terms of programming education, students in the lower grades of primary school solve quizzes and learn simple logic for control robots. In the upper primary grades, they develop visual-language programs that include conditional statements and loops. In secondary school, they develop text-language programs that include different types of data and modular programming. Although the new curricula are aimed more at computer science, they still include ICT literacy in the lower grades, e.g., e-safety and information ethics.