Challenges in Introducing Programming: A Case of K-12 Indonesian Education

Programming can help K-12 students to develop their 21st-century core skills. Despite the benefits, programming is not common to be delivered in Indonesian K-12 education. There is a need to understand potential challenges in introducing programming to K-12 students. We developed a questionnaire survey covering four identified dimensions of challenges: administrative, facilities, teachers, and students. We also asked about common programming assessments and their preferred software features for teaching programming. Forty K-12 teachers were invited to complete the survey. The responses were analyzed with thematic analysis using a bigram-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and descriptive statistics. Our study shows that the challenges include limited learning modules, an insufficient number of computers, limited programming skills, and limited computational thinking skills. Scratch was the most common programming language used and many programming assessments were about debugging a program or writing a small program. Visualization and animation can be helpful in teaching programming.