Switzerland, a highly affluent, but in terms of K-12 CSEd somewhat conservative country, has made a bold movement which may lead to the successful crossing of the CSEd chasm (Fig. 1). With the introduction of Lehrplan 21, the new common curriculum for compulsory education in the 21 German-speaking states, CS will be introduced into the Swiss elementary schools starting from the first grade. In anticipation of the changes imposed by the new educational framework, Switzerland is radically shifting its strategy by introducing mandatory preservice teacher CSEd starting at the elementary school level. The term pre-service teacher refers to the undergraduate students who study to become primary level teachers. Following from that, since September of 2017, the School of Education of Northwestern Switzerland (PH FHNW), requires its students (pre-service teachers), to take a mandatory CSEd course in order to be able to graduate and teach. In order to find out how effective the course was we conducted a study collecting both qualitative and quantitative data from more than 600 students that took the course. This paper presents the philosophy of the course and discusses initial findings from the study. Our results show that even though pre-service teachers can easily learn basic programming, the question about learning CT still remains open.

Computational Thinking1 is argued to be an essential skill for the workforce of the 21st century. As a skill, Computational Thinking should be taught in all schools, employing computational ideas integrated into other disciplines. Up until now, questions about how Computational Thinking can be effectively taught have been underexplored preventing efforts to cross the large gap between early adopters and the early majority, conceptualized as the Computer Science Education chasm. A promising strategy to cross the chasm is underway in Switzerland. Switzerland recently introduced a national curriculum, called Lehrplan 21, mandating Computer Science Education. This mandate requires the Computer Science education of elementary and middle school students. In 2017, the School of Education of Northwestern Switzerland (PH FHNW), introduced a mandatory pre-service teacher Computer Science Education course, to satisfy this mandate. All the PH FHNW students who study to become elementary school teachers must pass this two-semester course. The first part of this course was taught for the first time in fall of 2017. This paper presents the philosophy of this course and an initial analysis of both qualitative data capturing the students’ perceptions of Computational Thinking and quantitative data describing shifts in students’ skills and attitudes as effect sizes. The data suggest that it is possible to teach a basic understanding of programming to non-self-selected pre-service elementary school teachers.