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Implementing a New Computer Science Curriculum
for Middle School in Israel
Iris Zur Bargury
Ministry of Education
Tel-Aviv, Israel, and
Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania
iriszu@education.gov.il
Bruria Haberman
Holon Institute of Technology, and
Davidson Institute of Science Education
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel
bruria.haberman @weizmann.ac.il
Orna Muller
Software Engineering Dept., and
Teaching & General Studies Depts.
Ort Braude College of Engineering
Karmiel, Israel
ornamu@braude.ac.il
Doron Zohar
Open University of Israel
Ministry of Education
Tel-Aviv, Israel
doron.zohar@openu.ac.il
Avi Cohen
Ministry of Education
Inspector-In-Chief, Computer Science
Tel-Aviv, Israel
avico@education.gov.il
Dalit Levy
Zefat Academic College, and
Kibbuzim College of Education
Tel Aviv, Israel
dalit_lev@smkb.ac.il
Reuven Hotoveli
Afeka - Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering
Tel-Aviv, Israel
reuvenh@afeka.ac.il
Abstract— as part of a national strategic plan recently established
by the Ministry of Education in Israel to strengthen science and
technology education, an innovative Computer Science (CS)
curriculum for middle school was developed. One main goal of
the new curriculum is to expose students at an early stage of
education to the fundamentals of CS and computational thinking,
and to encourage students to study CS in the future. We present
the curriculum and its initial implementation, focusing on issues
of teachers' professional development.
Keywords- algorithmic thinking, computational thinking,
computer science, curriculum, middle school, education, teachers'
professional development
I. INTRODUCTION
Aiming to increase the number of high-school students who
choose to major in science and technology, the Israeli Ministry
of Education launched the Science and Technology Excellence
program (STEP) in 2011 to increase the number of high-
school students who choose to major in science and
technology. This unique program is part of the overall
strategic plan to strengthen science and technology K-12
education in Israel
1
. Currently, less than ten percent of Israeli
high-school graduates major in both science and technology.
Raising this low percentage may improve the readiness and
preparation of potential candidates for academic studies in
science and engineering, and eventually influence their
becoming part of the high-tech industry.
The main goals of the STEP are therefore to expose
middle-school students to the fundamentals of science and
technology in order to encourage them to choose a major in
these areas in high school, and to develop a sense of
leadership in science and technology during their high-school
studies. The new middle school STEP curriculum, which
precedes the existing high-school curriculum in science and
technology, creates a continual and comprehensive six-year
science and technology curriculum for highly capable
students. It includes extra hours of Mathematics, Natural
Sciences (Chemistry, Biology, and Physics) and Computer
Science (CS) combined with Robotics.
The Israeli CS curriculum for high school is well known
internationally [7]; however, until recently, in typical Israeli
middle schools the students studied computer literacy, except
for a few short-term educational initiatives practiced on a local
1
http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Units/MadaTech/
basis for learning CS. The need to rethink computing
education on a national level complies with the current
national effort to adapt the education system to the twenty-first
century.
The education authority’s decision to include CS in the
middle-school’s new STEP was based on the premise that
learning CS in middle school would promote early acquisition
of computational thinking, which in turn, would enhance
students' scientific thinking and technological literacy. The
guiding principle for the new CS curriculum has therefore
been to focus on developing thinking skills rather than
programming skills, and to expose students to various
development environments using an inquiry-based approach,
and utilizing learning-through-enjoyment pedagogical
methods that can increase young students' motivation.
The curriculum consists of both mandatory and elective
modules: a. Introduction to CS, which provides the basis for
the entire program, and emphasizes the fundamentals of
algorithmic thinking; b. the spreadsheet, with an emphasis on
its usage for scientific inquiry; its inclusion in the CS
curriculum bridges the gap between the CS middle school
curriculum and other parts of the six-year STEP; c. Selection
between Introduction to Robotics, which exposes students to
engineering concepts and problems, and Basic Internet
Programming; d. The last module is devoted to developing a
small programming project from scratch.
The above modular program has been designed by a
professional committee established by the Israeli Ministry of
Education. The authors of this paper are all members of that
committee. From 2011 to the present, the first two modules
have been implemented in 183 pilot schools, concomitantly
with the initiation of professional development activities under
the supervision of the first author.
The next sections of this paper elaborate on the principles
and constraints that guided the committee in designing the
curriculum. The first section presents the rationale for teaching
computing at the K-12 level, and lists the programs currently
taught in Israel. Thereafter, the new CS curriculum for middle
school is described, and finally, implementation issues are
discussed, focusing on teachers’ professional development.
II. K-12 COMPUTING PROGRAM IN ISRAEL
A. Rational and Motivation
Computer science provides the knowledge and skills
foundation for contemporary technological advances:
"Maintaining our ability to meet present and future challenges
requires us to acknowledge CS as a core element of all STEM
(science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
initiatives" ([11], pp. 15). Learning CS enhances
computational thinking and may contribute to a better
understanding of other subjects as well [12]. Strengthening the
status of CS as a full-fledged and self-contained subject in the
educational system is most important [11]. However, the
increasing complexity of the field led to an unfavorable
external image [3] and posed new challenges in motivating
students to pursue CS as a career choice or a course of study in
which to major [11]. “Despite many years of our trying to
broaden our image, computing is still widely perceived as a
programmer’s field… Many outsiders wonder whether CS
departments will eventually disappear as the technology
evolves and other fields take over as the main contributors of
new computing technology” [3, pp. 336].
To address this problem on a national as well as a global
level, Cohen and Haberman (2007) suggested that CS be
presented as a language of technology, which describes
structures, processes, relationships, and communications.
Computer science serves as a platform for problem solving,
knowledge representation, and formalization of processes, as
well as for understanding technology and for performing
technology-related processes [1]. CS should be taught to
youngsters as one of five basic languages: a mother-tongue, an
elective international foreign language, a language of science
(mathematics), a language of art and body, and a language of
technology (computer science), each of which is used to
express themes and ideas or feelings associated with specific
domains and contexts. “Long-term study of these five
languages, along with intelligent practice while elaborating on
utilizing communication skills, is highly useful for successful
functioning on personal, national, and global levels” [2, pp.
54].
B. K-12 Computing Curricula in Israel
During the last few decades, various computing curricula have
been taught in Israeli schools as an elective subject, ranging
from computer literacy, up to computing fluency, usually
learned at elementary and middle school as part of other
subjects. This includes CS for high school in the academic
track [7] and software engineering for high school in the high-
technological track [9]. The curricula evolved over the years
according to changes and development of the field. Pre-service
and in-service teacher training courses were created to provide
teachers with technical and pedagogical knowledge [7,10].
Many research papers were published regarding the
implementation of these curricula using various pedagogical
approaches and students’ conceptualization of CS concepts
and their problem-solving performance (for example, see a
review in [11], pp. 29-51).
The CS curriculum for high school introduces CS
concepts and problem-solving methods independently of
specific computers and programming languages, along with
their practical implementation in actual programming
languages [7]. The program consists of five modules (90 hours
each): (a) Fundamentals of CS 1 and 2, which introduce
algorithmic problem-solving (two modules, 180 hours in
total); (b) Software Design, which focuses on abstract data
types and object-oriented programming; (c) A Second
Paradigm - alternatives to this module are logic programming,
functional programming, computer organization and assembly
language, computer graphics, information systems, and
stateless programming; and (d) CS Theory: Computational
models.
The programming languages chosen for teaching
fundamentals and software design have changed over the
years and currently are Object Oriented (JAVA or C#).
The Software Engineering program: During the last two
decades, a Software Engineering (SE) program especially
designed for high-school level has been in operation in Israel
[8]. The program consists of (a) an elective topic in natural
sciences/introduction to technology sciences, (b) Computer
Science, and (c) an elective and advanced topic in CS.
The program has scientific foundations and can be viewed
as an extension of the CS program. The main goals of the
program are (1) to introduce students to knowledge
representation, system-level perspective and formalization of
processes, and (2) to promote students’ creativity, and enable
them to construct an integrative knowledge of CS topics. The
specialized topics that schools can choose from are as follows:
Operating Systems, XML Web Services, Computer Graphics,
Expert Systems, and Design & Programming of Information
Management Systems. The students' final assignment is to
develop a comprehensive software project related to the elected
specialized topic.
III. THE NEW CS CURRICULUM FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL
The new CS program for middle school is part of the STEP,
based on an overall strategic plan to strengthen science and
technology K-12 education in Israel [13]. The program (180
hours: 60 hours a year, two hours a week) is intended for
students from the seventh to the ninth grades. With regard to
the high-school curriculum, a six-year sequence of the
curriculum is created. The main goal is to impart knowledge
and skills required for a person in the twenty-first century. It is
not aimed at training students to be programmers or computer
scientists, but rather to introduce students to logical and
algorithmic thinking and to expose them to different
development environments at an early stage. A somewhat
similar approach has been recently suggested by the American
Computer Science Teacher Association (CSTA) in their Level
I model curriculum for K-12 Computer Science, in the parts
that discuss K5-K8 [5].
Lowering CS contents from high school to middle school
will enable excellent students from the academic track to
complete the high-school curriculum a year earlier, during the
eleventh grade. That will allow such a student to be exposed
(if interested) during the twelfth grade to one of the
specialized areas in the SE program taught in the technological
track, and to develop a software project.
The first module constitutes the core of the whole program.
Its main goal is to expose the students to the fundamentals of
computational thinking and programming. The subjects include
serial execution, variables, conditions, loops, counters,
accumulators, messaging, and event handling. Since this is the
first year the students study CS at school, it was important to
choose a suitable programming environment that will:
Expose the students to algorithmic problems and their
solutions and enhance algorithmic thinking.
Enable students to implement various control
structures.
Make programming enjoyable, interactive, easy to use,
and graphically appealing.
Be translated to different natural languages.
Be free of charge (if possible).
Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) was the chosen environment.
Other alternatives that exist worldwide include Logo-based
environments, Alice (http://www.alice.org/),Greenfoot
(http://www.greenfoot.org/book/), and more recently
Bootstrap, “a standards-based curriculum for middle and high-
school students, which teaches them to program their own
videogames using purely algebraic and geometric concepts”
(http://www.bootstrapworld.org).
The second year begins with introducing the students to
using a spreadsheet for scientific research (second module).
Teaching a spreadsheet is required for the mathematics and
physics curricula. Hence, its inclusion in the CS curriculum
helps to create a bridge between the curriculum in middle
school and the general six-year STEP. The tools to be taught
include representation of graphs, using mathematical and
statistical functions, and wise use of conditionals.
The third module is elective and its guidelines are as
follows:
It is based on the knowledge taught during the first
year.
No new control structures are introduced
Students are exposed to new kinds of algorithmic
problems and new technologies.
It was decided that in the second year the main subject will be
Introduction to Robotics, focusing on algorithmic problem
solving and not (just) on the mechanical and electrical aspects.
Students receive a ready-to-program robot and can add to it
various sensors and download their software. The goals of
adding robotics to CS curricula are to (1) combine logical
thinking with engineering thinking, (2) expose students to
other technological areas, and (3) stimulate the students to be
independent learners. The module contains the following
topics: controllers, actuators, sensors, electrical energy and
mechanical energy, energy transformations, motors, an open-
loop control, and a closed-loop control. Students in the
program can compete in FLL competitions
(http://www.firstlegoleague.org/).
Since the Introduction to Robotics module is budget
dependent (which might be a problem) and because those
teachers without an engineering or electrical engineering
background were reluctant to teach this program, the authors
decided to suggest an alternative module that is less
engineering oriented and free of charge. In order to create
more continuity between the middle-school and the high-
school curricula, it was decided to suggest teaching Basic
Internet Programming by focusing on client-side
programming as an introduction to stateless programming
(taught in an elective module in high school). The module
focuses on HTML5 and JavaScript; the students practice
conditionals and loops.
The fourth module, which is taught during the third year of
study, is devoted to developing a programming project
including writing a project proposal, modeling a problem,
designing a solution, and implementing it. The teachers can
choose the development environment for their students. The
programming project helps students internalize the use of
algorithms for solving problems and prepares them for further
studies in high school.
IV. IMPLEMENTING THE NEW PROGRAM
The program has been implemented in stages for the past
two years. At the first stage 30 schools were selected to
participate in a pilot program, most of which are located in the
periphery of the country in order to promote a segment of the
population that is less accessible to educational resources.
Twenty-seven of them (709 students) continued to the next
stage the following year.
At the second stage 183 middle-schools (5696 students)
participated in the program. In each school, the students that
were chosen for the program excelled in their age group. At the
third stage about 100 additional schools are planned to join the
program the following year (2013). The total number of
teachers who teach the CS program this year is 172.
Teachers constitute the cornerstone of any curriculum
[4,8,11]. Successful implementation of a new curriculum
greatly depends on the pedagogical and content knowledge of
the teachers as well as their satisfaction from the ongoing
training and the support offered by the curriculum’s initiators.
Prior to the development of the curriculum presented here, no
formal CS program was available for middle schools in Israel.
Accordingly, recruiting and retraining teachers for the new
program has been challenging but rewarding.
A. Preliminary criteria for approving teachers to teach the
CS program
Initially, the Ministry of Education in Israel decided that the
new STE curricula will only be taught by experienced and
professional teachers. The rationale behind this decision is that
qualified teachers should exhibit the following general
qualities: (a) possess at least a Bachelor's degree in CS or
engineering and a teaching certificate, and (b) have experience
(of at least 3 years) in teaching the CS program at the highest
level and in successfully preparing students for the high-school
matriculation exam.
Since the criteria plan was restrictive, its implementation
produced a shortage of qualified teachers. Academic retraining
courses for prospective teachers with professional hi-tech
experience were established to alleviate teacher shortages.
Teachers having a background as high-tech professionals were
assumed to have an additional advantage of encouraging
students to study sciences, especially computer science.
B. Difficulties in assigning teachers
Shortly before the school year began, it became clear that
assigning qualified teachers is problematic for the following
reasons: (a) Qualified CS teachers who previously taught high-
school students felt uncomfortable and even refused to teach
middle-school students since:
The emotional needs of the younger students were
unclear to them;
Teaching skills at the middle-school level seemed
foreign to these teachers;
Different physical locations of the middle-school and
the high school complicated their work day
logistically;
Middle-school computer labs have a limited number of
computers compared with high-school labs.
The teachers needed to prepare lesson plans and
teaching materials for the new program.
(b) The Ministry of Education had to assign tenured teachers
to the program, even though they were not qualified for it.
(c) In schools that had not established a computer-related
program and thus had no qualified CS teachers, it was difficult
to find qualified teachers in the surrounding area, or to find
a suitable teacher who would agree to come on-site and teach
only two hours a week.
These kinds of difficulties were also encountered with Math
teachers, but mostly in CS and Physics, since it was the first
time those subjects were taught at middle school.
C. Reducing the criteria for qualified teachers
Owing to the difficulties in finding qualified teachers who
could teach the program, it was decided to relax the criteria for
accepting teachers, and to develop training courses for
them. Teachers who did not meet the original requirements
were permitted to teach the program provided that they agreed
to participate in a suitable course. Relaxing the professional
criteria resulted in accepting to the program less qualified
teachers, for example, CS teachers who had previously taught
only the lower levels in high school, qualified and experienced
science/electronics teachers who had some CS education but
who had not taught CS so far, students who were in their last
year of academic CSED studies, and Computer Literacy
teachers.
In implementing the program, several difficulties were
encountered:
Experienced high-school teachers were able to cope
with the challenge of teaching excellent students but
were not accustomed to teaching younger students.
New teachers faced typical difficulties of entering
the education system.
New teachers and teachers with no CS background
often taught at the technical-applicative level and did
not focus on the program's algorithmic requirements.
D. Training Courses
Teachers are obligated to participate in a training program
that was designed to provide them with pedagogical tools for
enhancing their students' algorithmic thinking. The training
consists of several courses, each of which is related to a
specific module of the program. Additional course in Java and
C# extends teachers’ knowledge in order to give them an idea
of what direction the students are heading to in high school.
Each course lasts approximately 3 months. The courses are
taught both in a computer lab and in an online environment to
ease the teachers’ burden. There are three or four lectures per
course and coursework is assigned weekly via a website.
E. Teachers' Support System
Reducing criteria implied that teachers constitute a
heterogeneous group, with different backgrounds and
knowledge. In addition, the fact that the teachers are
physically scattered throughout the country made it difficult to
support teachers and to arrange face-to-face (F2F) meetings.
Therefore, there was an urgent need to create a supporting
system that could overcome these constraints. In the
beginning, the Ministry of Education program coordinators
communicated with the teachers mainly through emails and
phone conversations; therefore, a forum designed for the
teachers in the program was established. The forum is mostly
used for interacting with the program’s coordinators. In
addition, a blog was established in order to manage the
distribution of instructional materials, either those developed
by professionals or materials developed by teachers in the
training courses that were found appropriate for distribution to
other teachers.
F. Preliminary Evaluation
The program will be evaluated at two levels. One is by
administering a nationwide exam aimed at assessing the
students’ understanding of the material taught. The first exam
was administered at the end of the first year of the program
and a preliminary evaluation of it is described in [13]. The
second evaluation is planned to take place at the end of this
year. The other level concerns the teachers.
Teachers completed a Likert-type questionnaire
assessing their perception of the program (1 (strongly
disagree) - 5 (strongly agree)). The questions evaluated the
extent of students' internalization of programming structures
and algorithmic thinking in their teachers' eyes (Table 1), and
teachers' sources of support, and their general satisfaction with
the program (Table 2). Sixty teachers completed the
questionnaire; fifty of them taught the program to 7th grade
classes for the first time, whereas the other ten teachers taught
the program for the second year, in both the 7th and 8th
grades. In addition to the questionnaire, personal
conversations with teachers were conducted.
TABLE I. TEACHERS' ATTITUDES REGARDING STUDENTS’ LEARNING
The Statements:
1st year
teachers
(N=50)
2st year
teachers
(N=10)
The program is interesting
4.5
4.6
The program promotes students'
algorithmic thinking
4.2
4.1
Students master conditional statements
4.2
4.5
Students master loop statements
4.1
4.3
The Algorithmic module contributed to
students' algorithmic thinking
4.3
4.2
The Robotics module contributed to
students' algorithmic thinking
3.8
TABLE II. TEACHERS' ATTITUDES REGARDING THE PROGRAM’S
SUPPORTING TOOLS AND THE TRAINING COURSE
I was assisted by:
1st year
teachers
(N=50)
2st year
teachers
(N=10)
Colleagues who teach the program
3.2
3.0
Other teachers
2.5
3.3
The program's blog
4.1
4.0
The teachers' forum
3.0
3.6
The program's supervisors
3.1
3.6
The materials developed for the program
4.1
4.2
Comments regarding the training:
F2F meetings may be given up
1.9
2.9
I've developed additional materials based
on examples I've seen in the course.
3.7
3.1
I would recommend my colleagues to join
the training course.
4.3
4.1
According to Table 1, the teachers were highly satisfied
with their students’ learning outcomes. According to Table 2,
the blog and the program materials are the teachers’ most
appreciated support tools. Despite the differences between the
original program design and the actual situation, providing
virtual support tools in addition to F2F meetings, established
during the pilot stages, show that teachers were satisfied with
the course plan and that their ability to use remote supporting
tools is increasing. Teachers need fewer F2F meetings, and are
able to study through consulting and by using virtual support
tools. Apparently collaboration tools contributed mainly to
retrieving more instructional materials and less to maintaining
ongoing communication among the teachers themselves.
Additional information gathered from personal
conversations and documentation of the difficulties
encountered indicated that there was a great diversity of
teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. In
addition, teachers' perceptions of the goals of the program and
its feasibility in teaching middle-school students differed. For
example, teachers expressed significantly different perceptions
regarding the need for an informal, game-like learning
approach, compared with the desire to move CS contents from
high school to middle school.
V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUDING REMARKS
The Science and Technology Excellence program for middle
school, which includes the new CS program described here, is
an educational initiative that aims at motivating and
encouraging highly capable young students to choose science
and technology studies in high school and academia. It is
based on the assumption that early exposure to science and
technology is a critical factor in attracting youngsters to these
fields and in adequately preparing them as well as sowing the
seeds for the development of the next generation of scientists
and engineers.
The program is based on expanding the scope of math and
science studies, beyond what most middle and high-school
students learn today, and to new areas of science and
technology that young students are not usually exposed to in
the traditional and existing curricula. Computer Science
integrated with Robotics was chosen as one of the main
scientific-technological areas to be included in the program.
Until recently, no official CS curriculum by the Israeli
Ministry of Education has been tailored to the needs and
capabilities of seventh to ninth graders, which also takes into
consideration the background and expertise of most middle-
school teachers.
Lowering CS content levels from high school to middle
school will enable excellent students from the academic track
to complete the high-school curriculum a year earlier and
during the last year of study to get a taste of the SE curriculum
in the technological track, and to develop a software project.
The aspiration to recreate for outstanding students a sequence
of six-year high-level studying of computer science
necessitated the construction and operation of a formal
curriculum for the lower grades. The new program emphasizes
the gradually building of basic concepts and principles in
computer science, the development of logical reasoning and
computational-algorithmic thinking, coping with the cognitive
challenges of problem solving, exposure to the processes of
software project development and the development of
students' creativity skills. Achieving these goals is fostered by
familiarizing the young students with several learning
environments where these concepts and principles can be
identified and elaborated.
The cornerstone of implementing a new educational idea or
a program lies in the teachers; therefore, at this stage of
implementing the program, we focused on in-service training
and on evaluating the process that the teachers underwent and
their feelings and attitudes at the end of one or two years of
experience.
It was realized that the original plan of setting high criteria
standards for approving teachers to teach the program was
unrealistic; this resulted in reducing the professional criteria of
acceptance to the program and the training courses; still, the
formation of an array of courses and support tools during the
first two years of implementation evidently helped those
teachers with different backgrounds.
The information gathered in the preliminary assessment
indicated that teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical
knowledge were very diverse, as were their perceptions of the
goals of the program and its feasibility in teaching middle-
school students. They reflected on their satisfaction with their
students' achievements and the available supporting tools.
Noteworthy are the improved attitudes of those teachers who
taught the program the second time regarding the program’s
potential to teach problem solving and to develop algorithmic
thinking among young students.
A main conclusion to be deduced from this preliminary
study is that building a properly tailored training courses for a
heterogeneous group of teachers, as well as diverse supporting
tools and suitable guidance, mostly on the web, contributes to
the professional development of teachers and enables bridging
the pedagogical and content gap between the desired and the
actual availability of qualified teachers.
Future work will further examine the relationship
between teachers' backgrounds and how they deal with the
program's instruction, and the effect of teaching the entire 3-
year middle-school program on teachers' perceptions of the
program and its implementation. In addition, students'
achievements will be evaluated as well as the percentage of
students who choose to study computer science in high school.
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