What is Renaissance Polymath

A difficult challenge to computer science education is the systemic professional development of teachers. K-12 computer science education models limited to voluntary in-service teacher professional development may not reach a critical majority of teachers who are skeptical towards information technology, computer science, programming and computational thinking. The inclusion of computer science in a national K-12 education standard in Switzerland has made it possible to move beyond voluntary K-12 computer science education for in-service teachers to mandatory pre-service teacher education for all elementary teachers. This chapter describes the vision of the Digital Polymath as a digitally enabled person empowered by computational thinking to connect computer science with other disciplines. The course design, combining game design activities, computational thinking tools and the 7 big ideas from the computer science principles framework is outlined and experiences are reported.