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"Despite a growing effort to implement computational thinking (CT) skills in primary schools, little research is reported about what CT skills to teach at what age. Therefore, the research questions that guide this study read: (1) How is age related to students' success in computational thinking tasks? (2) How are computational thinking tasks perceived by students? (3) How do students' experience learning with respect to computational thinking? 200 primary school students between the age of 6 and 12 participated in this study. These students got introduced to two CT subjects: abstraction and decomposition. We found that age seems to be related with these concepts, with an interaction effect for gender in the abstraction task. No differences found between young and older students in the constructs perceived difficulty, cognitive load, and flow indicate that young primary school students can engage in learning these CT skills."

"Responding to this request, the NCCA carried out research including an audit of curriculum policy related to coding in 22 jurisdictions; a more in-depth investigation in six jurisdictions; and a review of literature on computational thinking. Concluding in a final report with key discussion points and future directions in relation to integrating coding and computational thinking in a redeveloped primary school curriculum."

All primary school children in England are required to write computer programs and learn about computational thinking. There are moves in other countries to this effect such as the U.S. K-12 Computer Science Framework (CSF) for development.

In 2015 a curriculum framework for Computational Thinking was developed for lower secondary education in the Netherlands. The framework is based on ISTE and CSTA, translated for the curriculum in the Netherlands and validated by experts, teachers, teacher educators and publishers. Based on this validated curriculum a new learning trajectory was designed for primary education, in collaboration with teachers and principals from three schools.

In 2018 the Netherlands started the development of a new curriculum framework for primary, lower and upper secondary education. New themes in curriculum are Digital Literacy, citizenship and a strong focus on 21st century skills. Digital Literacy is defined as a combination of ICT skills, media literacy, information literacy and Computational Thinking. Starting with a vision on a theme such as Digital Literacy and using this vision as a starting point for describing big ideas. For Digital Literacy eight big ideas were described: data and information, safety and privacy, using and controlling, communication and cooperation, digital citizenship, digital economy, applying and designing, and sustainability. Computational Thinking is integrated in each of these big ideas. The underlying framework for Computational Thinking is based on ISTE and CSTA and each big idea is specified as a learning trajectory describing learning objectives leading to a new legal curriculum framework in 2022.

Computational Thinking (CT) is emerging as a key competence across all disciplines, professions and throughout society. It can be defined as combining problem solving and design to create useful solutions, informed by the possibilities that Computing offers

The chapters in the 2020 edition of Research Highlights in Technology and Teacher Education represent some of the finest research from our SITE 2020 Annual Conference. Each paper here has undergone several rounds of rigorous review, and we are pleased to share them with you in this twelfth edition. These chapters, focused on curriculum studies, educator development, and student learning, demonstrating the wide scope of SITE researchers, and showing the international representation that can be found within the SITE community.