The effort to promote effective K-12 computer science education is stymied by numerous barriers. This site is dedicated to collecting and identifying these barriers as well as resources.

Here are the barriers (not an exhaustive list):

Policy-related

• lack of qualified teachers (i.e. certification)
• cs not present in many school curricula, and it’s hard to add it
• unfunded educational mandates

Teaching-related

• lack of time to train teachers towards new education methods like active learning
• a focus on code over computational principles
• lack of standards to teach to

Technical-related

• difficult to bridge easy-to-learn tools and more widely used tools
• most programming languages are English-language-centric
• lack of adequate feedback in today’s tools (i.e. programming without a mentor and relying on error messages meant for professionals) forces students to be incredibly resilient to succeed

Social-related

• increasingly disproportionate gender representation, as well as stereotypes of computer science students, discourage k-12 learners due to identity conflict (Wang, Moghadam 2017)
• access to computer science educational resources are heavily influenced by income and access to technology (which includes training and use)
• lack of widespread understanding of the importance of computational thinking (cf. “critical thinking”)