Deadline for submissions:  22nd April 2023

Notification to authors: 30th May 2023

CSpathshala (https://cspathshala.org) proudly announces the fifth annual conference on Computational Thinking in Schools (CTiS2023) on 7th and 8th July, 2023 at IISER, Pune and hosted by City Pride School, Pune. The conference will address the theme Enhancing teacher preparation for integrating computational thinking. It will be held in hybrid format with in-person participation encouraged to the extent possible.

The CTiS (Computational Thinking in Schools) conference is an annual event organised by the ACM, India (Association for Computing Machinery, India) and the CSpathshala community. It aims to bring together teachers, educators and researchers to discuss issues of curriculum, pedagogy, policy and implementation, related to bringing computational thinking to schools.

CSpathshala is an ACM India initiative to bring a modern computing curriculum to Indian schools. In the National Education Policy 2020 and in many countries across the world, Computational Thinking (CT) has been identified as one of the essential skills to be developed in children during the school years. It advances the notion that the Mathematics and Science behind Computer Science go far beyond the simple ability to use computers and programming languages, and can be taught and discussed in schools even without the use of computers. The first CTiS conference was held in Pune in April 2019, the second and third conferences were held as virtual events in October 2020 and September 2021 respectively. Last year the fourth annual conference was held at IISER Pune in hybrid mode. The 4th conference saw participation of 300 participants in person at IISER Pune and Tribal Welfare Schools, Nagpur with 2,000+ online participation from 18 states in India and 7 countries (US, UK, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Finland). All four conferences were greatly successful and were well received by teachers and educators.

CTiS2023 aims to provide a platform for teachers, educators and experts to share their best practices as well as challenges faced in implementing computational thinking in education. The discussions will focus on integrating CT activities, both plugged (with the use of computers) and unplugged (without the use of computers) in various school subjects, on student learning outcomes and on disseminating findings of CT based experiments or classroom research conducted by teachers and educators across the country. It is hoped that the deliberations of the conference will enable teachers to become better equipped to integrate CT in their respective classrooms.

The conference will feature keynote addresses, panel discussions and paper presentations on various themes related to Computational thinking.

One of the primary objectives of the CTiS2023 is to elicit the practicing teacher’s views and understanding with regard to CT. Interested participants may send abstracts for paper presentations (not exceeding 1000 words) related to any one of the following themes (though not restricted to these themes). Abstracts may be in English, Hindi or Marathi.

Participants are encouraged to focus their presentation on sharing their own work and experience related to CT. Please refer to the abstract template and samples provided for preparing your abstract. It is recommended to follow the format suggested by these samples.

Deadline for submissions: 22^nd April 2023
Notification to authors: 28th May 2023

Please send the abstract to [email protected] (in DOC or PDF format) by 2nd April 2023. The names of all authors, the details of school affiliation and contact details are ESSENTIAL. If a participant feels that s/he needs help and guidance in writing the abstract, s/he may approach the committee.

The submissions will be reviewed by the conference program committee. Originality as well as clarity of ideas presented will be the primary criteria for an abstract to be selected for final presentation. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 28th May 2023. The program committee members will mentor the selected authors to prepare them for the final presentation in the conference.