The Star-Topology K-12 Informatics Curriculum: A Position Paper for International CS Education

The Star-Topology K-12 informatics curriculum is an architectural proposal: that the durable engine of K-12 algorithmic-thinking pedagogy is a two-axis decomposition — a spine of seven content-independent cognitive milestones traversed across age bands, and, at each milestone, a cluster of variationaxis problems engineered to induce deep-structure schemas rather than surface familiarity. The architecture was specified by the parent Spine-Cluster paper [1] for Olympiad-band trainees and downscaled to K-12 by a companion paper [2]; both are program-internal artefacts of the elix-researches program targeting Vietnamese learners. This standalone position paper restates the architecture for an international CS-education audience. The position has three load-bearing claims. First, the linearcurriculum tradition codified in ACM/IEEE CC2020, CSTA K12 Standards, and Brennan-Resnick computational thinking — together with the contest-pipeline tradition codified in the IOI Syllabus and USACO Guide — leaves a structural gap at the recognition phase: each tradition either lists content topics in a linear order or assumes the recognition skill, but no tradition specifies how recognition is induced. Second, the spine-cluster decomposition closes that gap by separating cognitive progression (spine) from content exposure (clusters), and by treating variation-axis coverage inside each cluster as the operational definition of schema-inducing exposure. Third, the architecture is engineered to be falsifiable at curriculum scale: a deployment either exhibits monotonic spine progression with cluster variationwidth above a stated threshold, or it does not. We situate the position against the linear, computational-thinking, contest, mastery-learning, and Knowledge-Space-Theory traditions; we name the four already-shipping deployment case studies (Python Pathway, Document Engineering, Layer I education-guidance series in design, and the Star-Topology Skills program internal architecture itself); we list the observations that would force retraction; and we invite international replication and refutation. The paper is a position statement, not a validation study. No cohort data is reported. The quality gate is the program's rubricdriven audit loop, not empirical trial; the paper is a paper-grade artefact addressed to the international research community whose engagement is the next bottleneck on the architecture's external uptake.