Teaching Informatics in Lower-Secondary Schools: Views of Informatics Teachers

Informatics has become an essential area in nowadays life, but studies show that in many countries people lack sufficient informatics skills to meet the expectations of the employment field. As the first choices about the future are made after basic school, more attention should be paid to raise lower-secondary students' interest in informatics. In addition, the role of programming in lower education as part of informatics levels has grown rapidly in recent years. Even in this respect, informatics education with different content is offered in different schools in Estonia. The aim of the work-in-progress paper is to describe informatics teachers' vision of teaching informatics in the lower-secondary level. To achieve this aim, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 informatics teachers. The interviews were analyzed using the thematic analysis method. The main results of this preliminary study indicate that there is no universally implemented concept of teaching informatics in the lower-secondary level in Estonia and teachers' decisions about the aspects to teach depend mainly on their own knowledge and skills.