Informatics programmes have existed as educational programmes in higher education for more than fifty years, but the time has come to expand Informatics to be a subject at all educational levels: primary, secondary and higher education. At all levels, a two tier strategy is needed with both specialisation and integration of Informatics.
Implementation of this strategy entails difficult tasks. In higher education, all other study programmes must address and absorb relevant aspects of Informatics; in secondary as well as primary education, Informatics must be developed both as an
individual, compulsory subject and also absorbed into all other subjects. These changes represent a truly grand challenge for all educational systems.
Standing back, imagine a situation where mathematics only existed within specialised programmes in dedicated departments in higher education, and where citizens in general only had basic skills in elementary arithmetic. This would be excessively constraining and would deny the richness that flows from exporting mathematics, absorbing it into the entire educational system as a subject and properly integrating relevant aspects into other subjects.
This is the challenge society is facing in Informatics education. It can be handled, and it must be handled, but it requires a huge and ambitious effort and a humble attitude. The opportunity has to be taken to iteratively experiment and evaluate in order to identify and settle on appropriate ways of implementing Informatics for All.
The core aspect is to rethink how to teach Informatics to all. It is fairly well understood how to teach Informatics as a specialised subject in higher education, i.e. to would-be professionals. But teaching Informatics to all, both as an independent subject and integrated in other subjects, calls for a need to rethink in overall terms what to teach (both breadth and depth) and how to teach it. This is not a trivial task and is depicted in the Figure below. Here the expertise in the specialization is seen to flow down to high school and primary school levels and also across becoming integrated with other disciplines at all educational levels.
