Identifying Teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Computer Science in the Primary Years

Best practice for building teacher capacity in subject domains requires strong links to be made between the curriculum content, pedagogy and the effective use of teaching resources. Until recently primary school computing education has largely focused on developing digital literacy and the effective use Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for learning and teaching. However, the introduction of new Computer Science (CS) curricula worldwide raises a significant need for finding ways to build our understanding of effective learning and teaching and how to build teacher capacity. The technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) model has been adopted by teachers and education researchers for understanding and designing purposeful classroom technology integration across subject areas. While TPACK has been well-researched in other subject areas, such as mathematics and science, limited research has harnessed TPACK for CS. We adopt the TPACK model as a framework to analyse teachers' contributions to an online teacher professional development (PD) community for algorithms and programming, further exploring differences associated with teacher confidence. We present examples of TPACK generated by teachers that demonstrate the unique and complex nature of TPACK for CS and build a conceptualisation of TPACK for primary years' CS. Our paper has implications for the design of primary years CS PD for teachers and the evaluation of teachers' professional knowledge in CS education.