It’s Computational Thinking! Bebras Tasks in the Curriculum

Abstract

Abstract.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.Keywords: Bebras contest, computational thinking, computer science education, informatics curriculum, informatics education, task solving IntroductionThere is an increasing focus on computational thinking within the teaching of computer science, computing or informatics (from here on referred to as informatics) in school. Computational thinking was only recently popularised as a concept in 2006 by Wing (2006), although the original definition stems from Papert (1996). Wing claims that computational thinking is for everyone and involves "solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behaviour, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science" (Wing, 2006, p. 34). Some new informatics curricula have a significant focus on computational thinking skills being developed, for example in England (Brown et al, 2014) and Poland (Syslo & Kwiatkowska, 2015). In the longstanding Bebras contest (Bebras, 2016), tasks are designed which demonstrate computer science principles whilst engaging students in problem-solving in a motivating way.Bebras is an informatics education community-building model and is designed to promote informatics learning in school by solving short concept-based tasks (Dagiene & Stupuriene, 2016). Tasks are the most important component of the Bebras model. Each Bebras task should include at least one informatics concept, attract children's attention by a story, picture or interactivity, be short (fits in a computer screen), and not require specific technical knowledge. Some countries use the Bebras to strengthen collaborative learning; for example, in Germany pupils solve Bebras tasks in pairs during a contest and discussions are allowed between the pairs.Alongside the initial goal of the Bebras project to motivate pupils to be more interested in informatics topics there is a strong intention to deepen algorithmic, logical and operational thinking and, more recently, c...

Resurgence of Informatics Education in Schools

“…Scores are grouped and the number of students scoring a range of marks is shown for each age group. As we can see, the figures show a normal distribution of scores in solving tasks across all age groups (similar results were obtained in the 2015 challenge in both Lithuania and the UK [8]).…”

“…The Bebras community has reflected on the involvement of girls in informatics education. An investigation on gender issues was done during previous years, for example, in the UK and Lithuania [8]. The Bebras challenge can be seen to be an event that attracts girls' attention to informatics education: worldwide, more than 40% of participants are girls (we cannot estimate the number exactly because some students have not indicated their gender).…”

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“…They will also be important to teachers who wish to find tasks that fit with the topic being taught in the curriculum (Dagiene & Sentance, 2016;Yang & Park, 2014). Therefore, keywords information should be retained with the task to help Bebras users select from previous tasks and identify teaching topics around Bebras tasks.…”

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“…They are introduced into a child environment and through the interaction with them it forms his representation of important scientific ideas and analyzes its own thinking (Papert, 1980); For the last 10-15 years, there has been rapidly growing the movement of mass competetions, which tend to occupy an intermediate place between the school course of computer science and mathematics and the Olympiad movement (van der Vegt, 2016;Kostadinov et al, 2015;Sysło and Kwiatkowska, 2015). The most famous contest is the BEBRAS competition, which brought together the methodological ideas of scientists and practitioners from more than 60 countries in overcoming this challenge (Dagienė and Sentance, 2016). Starting from multiple choice test problems, which connects the form of the contest with various systems of knowledge assessment, over time the competition absorbed the ideas of other researchers and the range of possible types of answers in tasks was expanded by so-called dynamic tasks.…”