Teaching Computing via a School Placement

Across Wales -- as, but even more so than, elsewhere -- there is a critical shortage of teachers who are qualified to teach Computer Science. This issue is particularly coming to the fore now due to ongoing changes to the national school curriculum which is seeing a rigorous computer science curriculum replacing the ICT curriculum which has been passed off as computing in most schools over the past several decades. In this paper we describe the efforts made by Technocamps to tackle this problem by encouraging computer science graduates to consider education as a viable career option. In particular, we outline a credit-bearing module which incorporates an extensive school placement. We discuss the challenges with setting up and running such a module as well as its effectiveness.