Enabling students to evaluate the impacts of computing on their own lives and on society is an internationally proclaimed goal of secondary computing education. The literature and existing curricula provide no shortage of various example impacts and contexts, but how these relate to each other, and what, if anything, constitutes their common conceptual core, remains largely unclear. As of yet there exists no coherent and actionable educational model for computing impacts. Such a model is necessary, however, for a consistent and sustainable development of related competency.

Based on extant literature and data from 35 interviews, this paper proposes a grounded-theory model of computing impacts for secondary education. It identifies and defines various impact-related concepts which, I argue, can provide a basis for student assessment, can inform the selection of teaching examples and, above all, can facilitate the abstraction and transfer of impact-related knowledge across contexts and artifacts.