New horizons in the assessment of computer science at school and beyond: leveraging on the ViVA platform

A revolution is taking place across Europe and worldwide in how we teach our children about computing, in primary and secondary school. Out goes ICT and how to use Microsoft Office; in comes coding and computer science. Assessment has a crucial role to play in this revolution. If teachers use low-quality assessment instruments we will end-up teaching the wrong subject; and vice-versa. This paper reviews the state of the field, and makes concrete, achievable proposals for developing shared, high quality assessments for computer science. Central to this proposal is the collaborative platform VIVA (the Vilnius collaboratively coded and Validated computer science questions/tasks for Assessment). Two requirements are key to VIVA: 1) support for multiple competency frameworks, so that the contributors can meta-tag resources with respect to the framework they are most familiar with; and 2) support for crowdsourcing the validation of each question/task and its mapping to competencies. The use of a taxonomy of questions/tasks type that has been mapped to computational thinking concepts and to a competency framework is proposed. Some seed questions are already available in the online platform prototype, and various supporters have granted permission to use large questions banks. The design requirements of a full implementation of the VIVA platform for a modern and effective approach to assessment including support for digital badges, are outlined; and some preliminary results from a survey administered to the initial contributors to VIVA are presented.