Graph-based analysis of computer science curricula for primary education

Abstract

Because of the present deep impact of information technology on society, school subjects that deal with topics of computer science or digital literacy gain importance nowadays. Some countries start to teach related topics in primary education and even in kindergarten. The underlying curricula, educational standards and/or competency models have already been developed and established and differ in a lot of points. Because of these differences, a comparison is a complex task. In this paper a graph-based approach is applied to introduce a framework for comprehensibly evaluating the different curricula, standards and competency models and to demonstrate its use by analyzing and comparing six existing curricula, standards and competency models. Our approach maps the content of curricula and standards to a directed graph by connecting their knowledge items with each other via dependency relations. This method enables a formalized comparison using graph theoretical metrics like the highest degrees, numbers of sources and sinks, or the connectivity. The representation is mapped to a graph database, allowing for further analysis of the content and preparing the ground for teachers and curriculum-developers to individually form a computer science curriculum in primary schools.