Computer Science Education in Angola: The Key Challenges

The increasing adoption of technology in the classroom offers several advantages, but also challenges all stakeholders, including instructors, students and decision makers. E-learning has gained momentum, especially in the last two years with the onset of the pandemic, forcing lectures to migrate to the internet and requiring new methodologies to support knowledge transfer between instructors and students. Thus, to verify the situation of Angola in relation to practices and methodologies related to the teaching of informatics, we search to identify existing practices through the application of a questionnaire to teachers of informatics subjects in secondary schools, colleges, and universities of the country. This study aims to discover the effects of using technology as a support for teaching computer science classes, including software engineering, programming, and computer networks. Therefore, 82 participants were involved in this study answering an online survey. Results shown that, although digital technologies are revolutionizing the world and consequently education, institutions in Angola still face several challenges, such as, lack of laboratories for practical classes, lack of electricity, lack of internet, and lack of computers for students. In addition, the adoption of technologies in the classroom proved ineffective, perhaps because of the absence of determining factors for technological inclusion by the institutions, or even because of the training of teachers in the area, whether weak, inefficient, or incomplete. In this sense, although the use of software in the classroom facilitates the acquisition of knowledge, there are still several barriers to be overcome for this to happen broadly. This study concludes that it is necessary to consider technology as a basic need for the facilitating role it plays in society.