How to Determine the Educational Usability of Programming Tools?: Teachers’ Perspectives

Programming tools (PTs) have a pivotal role in teaching and learning in computer science education: they influence how teachers design their lessons, but also centrally shape students' perception of (learning) programming. Over the years, a large number of PTs have been developed and will be developed in the future. However, with this multitude of very different PTs, how can teachers select suitable and useable ones for their lessons? To evaluate the suitability and usability of a PT for their lessons teachers should apply their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). So far, though, it's not clear what concrete knowledge facets teachers need to evaluate the suitability and usability of PT and how much they are already using this knowledge in their lesson planning.

In this article we 1) operationalize theoretically which knowledge facets teachers need to evaluate the suitability and usability in light of existing models and 2) explore empirically which of these facets they actually use to evaluate PTs. For this, we surveyed 80 in-service computer science teachers in Germany.

The qualitative analysis of the data reveals that teachers consider not only technical aspects of the PT itself, but also take into account student needs, school infrastructure, the availability of additional resources and even ethical and legal issues. These findings provide a valuable first step in making the operationalization and usage of this specialised form teaching knowledge more specific.