The design of computer science curricula should rely on central concepts of the discipline rather than on technical short-term developments. Several authors have proposed lists of basic concepts or fundamental ideas in the past. However, these catalogs were based on subjective decisions without any empirical support. This article describes the empirical determination of central concepts for computer science education. Experts of computer science rated 49 concepts regarding four criteria. The cluster analysis of the data revealed the following central concepts: problem, data, computer, test, algorithm, process, system, information, language, communication, software, program, computation, structure, and model.
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