Computer Science in New Zealand high schools

The New Zealand Ministry of Education has recently released a new proposal for delivering computing topics in the final three years of High Schools. The proposal aims to address a number of issues by offering topics that will be academically challenging for students, and provide them with a broader view of the kinds of advanced topics they might study beyond High School. The proposed structure includes having Digital Technologies as a separate area in the technology curriculum, and includes a strand called Computer Science and Programming that has sufficient coverage to communicate to students what the subject area is really about.This paper reviews the circumstances that led to this proposal, describes the international context (especially in the US) for High School computing curricula, and examines the published proposal in some detail. It also considers the issues that are likely to come up in the implementation of the proposal, and how they might be addressed.