Off to new shores: Preparing Primary School Teachers for Teaching Algorithmics and Programming

In many countries, the demands are getting louder to bring computer science education into primary schools. Curricula and teaching approaches are evolving and educators have to work their way into new topics. Many primary school teachers feel overstrained by these developments and the need for appropriate teacher training is rising. In this paper, we describe the structure and contents of an in-service professional development workshop for primary school teachers without any previous knowledge in computer science ( CS) as well as first results of the pilot run with 40 teachers. Throughout the three-day workshop, the teachers get the chance to follow the students' path of learning by taking a primary school programming course themselves, engage intensively with the underlying algorithmic concepts through in-depth exercises and work on their own ideas for implementations in the classroom.