Textbook errors in binary searching
SIGCSE '88 Proceedings of the nineteenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Bubble sort: an archaeological algorithmic analysis
SIGCSE '03 Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
"Georgia computes!": improving the computing education pipeline
Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Bridging ICT and CS: educational standards for computer science in lower secondary education
ITiCSE '09 Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Computer Science in New Zealand high schools
Proceedings of the Twelfth Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 103
The CS10K project: mobilizing the community to transform high school computing
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
Exploring Computer Science: A Case Study of School Reform
ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)
Computer science in NZ high schools: the first year of the new standards
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
The role of teachers in implementing curriculum changes
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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In 2011 New Zealand introduced computer science as a topic that students could take as part of their studies in the last three years of high school. The change was initiated in late 2008, so the new material was introduced with barely two years of preparation and minimal teacher training. Despite this tight timeline, many schools adopted the new topic, and many students successfully completed assessment in it in 2011. The format of the assessment was required to be a report. In this paper we look carefully at the work that students submitted by examining publicly available information (statistics, markers' comments and exemplars), and performing a detailed analysis of a sample of 151 student papers. We describe the nature of the assessment (which is report-based with very flexible criteria for how students can demonstrate their understanding), and examine the kind of work that students submitted to meet the criteria, drawing out good practices that enabled students to do well. A recurring theme is the importance of students being able to use personal authentic examples so that the examiner can hear the "student's voice" in their report work, which provides evidence that the student has understood the topic rather than paraphrased descriptions. The analysis also reveals the value of prompting students effectively to get them engaged properly with the concepts, and identifies successful ways to achieve this in the three areas of the analysed standard (algorithms, programming languages and usability).