Implementing a new Computer Science Curriculum for middle school in Israel

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.