Some Findings on Informatics Education in Austrian Academic Secondary Schools

The educational system in Austria is very multifaceted, and academic secondary schools represent an important part in it. This type of schools, in German called “Gymnasium”, covers the age-group from 10 to 18 years and provides pupils and students with a broad and general education. For more than twenty years, informatics and computers have increasingly penetrated into secondary education. Austrian academic secondary schools have much freedom to cope with this challenging task within their autonomy. In this paper, a snapshot of the current situation is given with the main emphasis on the 9th grade. Only in this age-group, the “PISA-age”, informatics is a compulsory subject. The implementation of additional IT/informatics classes at lower secondary level is exclusively the result of autonomous decisions in schools. Recently, a web-based nationwide online research has been conducted. In this paper some preliminary results are presented.