Computer Science teacher interview questions

Do you have an interview coming up and want to get an idea of the type of questions you may be asked? Are you a subject leader and want to have a list of suitable subject-specific questions you could ask in an interview?

Here we have compiled a list of 45 questions covering technical questions as well as subject-relevant pedagogy questions which are useful for both the potential employer and interviewees wishing to prepare.

Technical questions to ask a computing teacher in an interview

1) How would you go about explaining the difference between a for and while loop to a low ability year 9 group?

2) What is the difference between a “nested if” and an “if…else if” statement?

3) Describe a starter activity you can use to introduce the pupils to pseudocode.

4) How would you explain what a ZIP file is?

5) How would you make a lesson on legal issues surrounding CS interesting?

6) Pick a discussion topic of your choice about an ethical issue of CS. Describe two different viewpoints to the argument.

7) What is your favourite programming language? Explain why it is the best one for your students.

8) Why are you passionate about CS?

9) What is your understanding of computational thinking?

10) How would you explain what the difference between ROM and RAM is?

11) Identify a misconception about the internet pupils commonly have. How would you overcome this?

12) Explain the difference between “lossy” and “lossless” image compression.

13) Tell me an interesting fact about a historical figure in computing history.

14) Explain how to add two 4 bit binary numbers together. How would you get your pupils to check their answers are correct?

15) Describe how you convert denary to hex.

16) What is meant by the term “file”?

17) How would you teach pupils about relational databases?

18) Describe a suitable starter activity you can use to introduce the pupils to 2D arrays.

19) How can you make the teaching of website development exciting? Give an example of one activity you would use.

20) Outline a lesson that you could use for helping pupils understand and avoid extremism and radicalisation over social media.

21) Describe a whole school assembly you could run on cyber bullying.

22) Describe 2 different homework tasks you have used in the past when teaching programming. How did these tasks benefit the pupils?

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Teaching pedagogy questions to ask a computing teacher/subject leader in an interview

23) Why do you want to teach?

24) What irritates you about teaching CS?

25) What CS topic do you look forward to teaching?

26) What CS topic do you feel less confident in teaching? How do you plan to overcome this?

27) How do you feel technology has altered the way we teach?