Computing is being introduced into the curriculum in many countries. Teachers' perspectives enable us to discover what challenges this presents, and also the strategies teachers claim to be using successfully in teaching the subject across primary and secondary education. The study described in this paper was carried out in the UK in 2014 where teachers were preparing for the mandatory inclusion of Computing into the curriculum. A survey was conducted of over 300 teachers who were currently teaching Computing to elicit their perspectives on challenges and strategies. From the analysis of the data, extrinsic and intrinsic challenges were identified for both teachers and students. In addition, a variety of pedagogical strategies were recommended by teachers from their own practice. In categorising approaches taken by teaching to support students five key themes emerged: unplugged type activities, contextualisation of tasks, collaborative learning, developing computational thinking, and scaffolding programming tasks. Further investigation could support whether these strategies can alleviate the challenges of teaching and learning of Computing for students and teachers. In particular developing student resilience in Computing is seen as a challenge while not many strategies are suggested. The results of this study will be useful for teachers who are new to the teaching of Computing.

In computer science education at school, computational thinking has been an emerging topic over the last decade. Even though, computational thinking is interpreted and integrated in classrooms in different ways, an identification process about what computational thinking is about has been in progress among computer science schoolteachers and computer science education researchers since Wing's initial paper on the characteristics of computational thinking. On the other hand, the constructionist learning theory by Papert, based on constructivism and Piaget, has a long tradition in computer science education for describing the students' learning process by hands-on activities. Our contribution, in this paper, is to present a new mapping tool which can be used to review classroom activities in terms of both computational thinking and constructionist learning. For the tool, we have reused existing definitions of computer science concepts and computational thinking concepts and combined these with our new constructionism matrix. The matrix's most notable feature is its scale of learners' autonomy. This scale represents the degree of choices learners have at each stage of development of their artefact. To develop the scale definitions, we trialed the mapping tool, coding twenty-one popular international computing activities for pupils aged 5 to 11 (K-5). From our trial, we have shown that we can use the mapping tool, with a moderate to high degree of reliability across coders, to analyse classroom activities with regard to computational thinking and constructionism, however, further validation is needed to establish its usefulness. Despite a small number of activities (n = 21) being analysed with our mapping tool, our preliminary results showed several interesting findings. Firstly, that learner autonomy was low for defining the problem and developing their own design. Secondly that the activity type (such as lesson plan rather than online activity) or artefact created (such as physical artefact rather than onscreen activity or unplugged activity), rather than the computational thinking or computer science concept being taught was related to learner autonomy. This provides some tentative evidence, which may seem obvious, that the learning context rather than the learning content is related to degree of constructionism of an activity and that computational thinking per se may not be related to constructionism. However, further work is needed on a larger number of activities to verify and validate this suggestion.

Welcome to Seattle and SIGCSE 2017! Seattle is a vibrant, forward-thinking city that offers the perfect backdrop for SIGCSE. We are sure that together, the Symposium and Seattle's many attractions, such the Space Needle and Pike Place Market, will engage your mind and your sense of adventure. The SIGCSE 2017 conference theme-Inspire, Innovate, Improve!-highlights our aim to inspire computing educators to innovate new teaching strategies, and to improve those strategies by engaging in the self-reflection and evaluation necessary to deliver the best possible learning outcomes for all. Our program showcases computer science education efforts in K-12, lower-and upper-level undergraduate courses, open-source software, outreach, and education research. A variety of sessions are sure to help you find what you are looking for, from Papers on experience reports, new curricula, and research studies, to Panels, Special Sessions, Workshops, Posters, Demonstrations, Birds of a Feather and the ACM SIGCSE Student Research Competition. We encourage you to visit our exciting Exhibits showcasing the latest in hardware, software tools, textbooks, educational programs, and educational research. On Thursday, Jeannette M. Wing, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Research, will deliver our opening plenary address. Jeannette will challenge us to embrace uncertainty in computing, which abounds in the real world where data drives discovery, as she helps us understand what implications this has for undergraduate computer science curricula. During our Saturday lunch, Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, will discuss strategies for fulfilling Seymour Papert's dream of using programming as a new way for all children to explore, experiment, and express themselves. This year's recipient of the SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community, Mats Daniels

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