TEACHER TRAINING ON FUNDAMENTAL PROGRAMMING FOR MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY – WHAT ARE THE COURSE TAKEAWAYS?

The introduction of computer programming in K-12 education is a prioritised initiative in many countries. In the Swedish context this is an ongoing process with support from the government and the National Agency for Education. The focus has been set on secondary school and how to implement programming as an extension for teaching and learning activities in mathematics and technology. Several studies have reported on how to optimise the teacher training, but less has been presented on learning outcomes that can have an impact on teaching and learning in secondary school. The aim of this study was to analyse and discuss how learning outcomes could be of use in secondary school teachers daily teaching and learning activities. The main research question to answer was: "In what parts of secondary school mathematics and technology can programming add value, and how might this be related to the learning outcomes of the teacher training?" Data have been gathered from course participants essays that were submitted in two batches of the teacher training course on programming. Essays were analysed thematically with the research strategy of analytical induction. Found themes have been grouped into main categories that are related to the essayists course outcomes. Most of the essayists have completed the course, but not all of them. Findings indicate that the subset of course takeaways that the essayists have chosen to reuse are related to their learning outcomes, but also to the stage of secondary school where they teach. Lower secondary school teachers with low learning outcomes have a tendency to choose the themes of visualisation of geometrical concepts and computational thinking. To be compared with upper secondary school teachers with high learning outcomes that had a preference for using programming to illustrate number series and statistics. However, there are a lot of variations from these themes and counterpoints, which is the main discussion in this paper. Interesting new themes that emerged from the analysis of the essays were Debugging, General problem solving