Knowledge construction in the Bebras problem solving contest

2023

This paper describes an unplugged computational thinking (CT) resource for primary and secondary schools developed from Bebras tasks. In Ireland, CT is not part of the primary school curriculum or mandatory in secondary schools. However, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment is in the process of revising the primary school curriculum to include aspects of CT. Our aim for creating this CT Obstacle Course is to introduce teachers (and pupils) without formal computer science training to the subject of CT. This is done in a manner that informs and motivates, and gives them the confidence to deliver CT materials in the classroom. We also want to find out from teachers how useful and important this type of resource is for developing problem-solving skills, and if our unplugged activity can support learning at various skill levels. Our CT Obstacle Course includes 14 Bebras tasks for primary schools and an additional 6 Bebras tasks for secondary schools. The activity is suitable for indoors and outdoors and is completed in groups, promoting teamwork and communication. We have delivered it to 146 primary school classes during 38 school visits between May 2021 and June 2022. It has been undertaken by 3,445 pupils and 195 teachers and other school staff. This paper describes our CT resource in detail, and reports teacher feedback from primary schools.

Baltic Journal of Modern Computing, 2017

A well-known challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking Bebras is based on task solving activity. The Bebras model is known as one of the methods that involves students to the learning and promotes students' reasoning. The Bebras motivates students to be interested more deeply in informatics. This goal can only be reached if the tasks are interesting and provoke some excitement. The interactivity is very typical for computers, so it is clear that a computer oriented challenge / contest should apply interactive elements to solve or explain tasks. This paper presents a tool that is used to code and design dynamic Bebras tasks. The paper has two main goals: 1) to analyse tasks used to engage student's in learning informatics fundamentals, and 2) to provide a description of the tool, so-called the Bebras Lodge, and illustrate application of this tool by discussing several examples.

Contests at school may attract students to be interested in technology. The international Bebras contest on Informatics and Computer Literacy shows that even short tasks can provide interesting problems that give insight to technology concepts. Within 45 minutes the pupils have to solve about 18 tasks of different difficulty level. There are different task sets available for different age groups from grade 5 to grade 13. A proper design of the tasks allows school students to solve tasks that involve even advanced topics of computer science. The key idea behind these tasks is not to ask for already learned facts but to give problems that allow students to learn something about concepts that are maybe new for them. We show some typical tasks which allow to learn some aspects of informatics concepts like algorithms, structures, concurrency, information representation, proper use of ICT, modeling, etc. The performance of Bebras contests in 9 countries during the last 4 years showed an unexpected and unusual high acceptance by school students and teachers. Many thousands of students participated and got a valuable input in addition to their regular informatics lectures at school.

Informatics in Schools: Improvement of Informatics Knowledge and Perception, 2016

Bebras is an award-winning, international contest and challenge in informatics that has been running for 12 years in primary and secondary schools, with 50 countries now participating. From a single contest-focused annual event the Bebras developed to a multifunctional challenge; an activitiesbased educational community-building network has grown up where the development of Bebras tasks has taken a very significant role. Bebras tasks present a motivating way to introduce computer science concepts to students as well as developing computational thinking skills. Tasks are categorized in terms of the concepts being covered, and each task includes an explanation of how the task relates to informatics. In this paper we propose that Bebras tasks can be used within the school curriculum (whether it is called informatics, computer science, computing or information technology) to promote computational thinking and provide teaching materials. We give examples of Bebras tasks that could be incorporated into the curriculum, and make recommendations for schools wishing to develop children's computational thinking skills.

Olympiads in Informatics, 2019

Predicting the difficulty level of a task on the concepts of computer science or computational thinking, like in the Bebras Challenge, proves to be really hard. But the announced difficulty level is needed in the contest format used in many local challenges. The Dutch contest system Cuttle has a new module for analysis. This is applied to one specific contest in order to find parameters explaining task difficulty. Using quantitative methods we were able to confirm a relation between answer types and difficulty and a tendency that tasks on data, data structures and representation are better answered than tasks on algorithms and programming.

Bull. EATCS, 2016

Throughout the world, educators have recognized that computer science or informatics fundamentals need to be introduced at all levels of schools. This can be done using various approaches. One of them is an international challenge on informatics and computational thinking named “Bebras.” We are going to survey the goals of the contest and discuss some examples of Bebras tasks.

Olympiads in Informatics, 2008

Training children for participation in informatics competitions and eventually in the IOI has been moving to younger ages and now is starting in many countries at a level of about 5-6th grades (about 11-12 years old). The main tools for teaching and preparation are tasks. We present the experience and problems given in the Bulgarian national competitions in informatics for school students in the mentioned age group. Some features of the Bulgarian system for the preparation of the youngest school students are discussed. The study covers a period from 2001 up to present. In the paper, an attempt is made to arrange and classify tasks by keywords. As examples, selected task descriptions and comments are given.

Informatics in Education

Computers, information and communication technology (ICT) are more and more involved in the education process. Students should learn to use information technologies (IT) in a suitable, effective way, and when learning any subject they should be capable to implement computer facilities and thus develop their learning methods. Competitions are an excellent tool to achieve these goals. Competitions play an important role as a source of inspiration and innovation - youngsters are attracted by competitions, they get easier involved in such an activity, more willingly discuss and become more active. IT contests may be a key to the potential of new knowledge and an attractive way of binding up technology and education. Interest in competitions essentially depends on problems. Really, choosing and developing interesting tasks (problems) is one of the most important issues bringing students into competitions. Attraction, invention, tricks, surprise should be desirable features of each proble...

Mathematics

The short task methodology enhances the Bebras constructive environment, and provides an emotional context that triggers the convolution of initially biased mental models and corresponding emotional reactions into an unbiased set of conceptual models for informatics education. This provides the motivation of our research–to explore the process of pedagogical design of short informatics concept-based tasks from the standpoint of mindset formation, which allows one to build conceptual models for CT education. The aim of the research is to gain a conceptual understanding of what a short task is in the context of the global Bebras Challenge initiative. We explore the principles which should underlie the pedagogical design of short tasks for informatics education that scaffold CT. Exploration of a number of practical examples of the Bebras short tasks is the background of our research methodology. The results include an analysis of the structure of short tasks, focusing on the interactio...

Computer Tools in Education

Contests and Olympiads should be considered not only as a way of comparing the students' levels of training. They can be regarded as a different way of organizing the mental activity of participants. Different types of tasks initiate various types of intellectual activity among students. The Olympiad tasks differ from "school" ones by non-standardness, a combination of the understandability of the formulation and the non-obviousness of the solution, the possibility of various approaches to solving the problem. At the same time, the variety of contests and Olympiads raises the task of investigating and classifying them, focusing on supporting different styles of thinking. In this paper, we carry out an analysis of contests and Olympiads in informatics, aiming at identifying aspects of the student's intellectual activity, which are not sufficiently evaluated at school. The Olympiad in Discrete Mathematics and Theorethical Informatics is at the intersection of the two sciences. The article deals with the problems encountered by the organizers of competitions in mathematics and computer science and demonstrates some ways to solve them using the example of the Olympiad.