Bebras Based Activities for Computer Science Education: Review and Perspectives

Abstract

The Bebras international challenge on informatics and computational thinking (CT), targeted to pupils in primary and secondary schools, is being run in more than 50 countries yearly. Tasks used in this challenge are created by an international community that meets once a year to improve them. In addition to a large amount of work done on tasks, this community is also conducting research on different aspects of Bebras, from the study of good task criteria to analyses of the organisational structure of the community. This paper presents a review of research aiming at building activities based on Bebras material to serve computer science (CS) education. They include classroom activities, workshops, games development, and design of tests to evaluate CT skills. The paper also presents the results of a survey conducted among the Bebras community to identify existing activities using Bebras tasks and ideas for future ones. The results are summarised as a guideline with perspectives aiming at fostering teachers to spread CS and CT related competencies to their pupils. The paper concludes by proposing new research directions and experiments that may be led in schools.

Appendices

A Detailed Results About Annual Brochures

The vast majority of surveyed countries regard the annual brochures as a resource mainly targeted to teachers:

• “We develop a solutions guide each year which is aimed at teachers. It includes how to get the correct answer as well as computational thinking explanations” (Australia)

• “For teachers: to develop children’s logical thinking and increase their interest in CS” (Belarus)

• “The aim is to introduce for teachers and students how informatics tasks can look like. Also it is important for teachers especially primary school teachers to get explanations of each task that they can discuss with students and be sure about informatics content. Many teachers like tasks and use them to motivate students to start some informatics topics” (Lithuania)

• “For teachers to use as classroom resources. For students for their own understanding” (Canada)

• “Teachers who want to reuse this as additional teaching material or explain the past competition’s task to the student” (Switzerland)

• “After the 1st part of the challenge we offer access to all the tasks (with answers) for teachers so they can use it to help prepare students for the final challenge and for the next year” (Latvia).

Some countries put the accent on the pupils when building their brochures:

• “To share tasks with those who did not participate in the challenge, did not achieve good results to pass to the 2nd round or a pupil had no opportunity to participate in the challenge (no responsible teacher at a school)” (Estonia)

• “Pupils who want to train more off-contest” (Switzerland).

Several countries need or produce additional information about tasks in order to write their annual brochures:

• “Sometimes images for the solutions or the solutions need to be reworded to improve the explanation for teachers” (Australia)

• “Sometimes we add more information about ‘It’s Informatics‘especially for primary school teachers” (Lithuania)

• “We always had to hunt down information to complete the meta sections. Authors and contributors names as well as comments were usually all over the place and had to be searched. This includes the complete data set of the authors and contributors: full name, email address and country” (Switzerland)

• “We map CT themes to those used by our program” (India)

• “Links to Ireland schools curriculum” (Ireland)

• “Educational goals related to Informatics, teaching and learning methods, etc.” (South Korea)

• “Sometimes we give lesson ideas” (The Netherlands).

B Detailed Results About Activities Using Bebras Tasks

This appendix gives the detailed answers from respondents to the survey about the activities they are organising in their country, for the five main categories of activities identified from the literature review.

1.1 B.1 Textbooks for Schools

• There is in Hungary the CT course for university students where they create and solve such tasks and also they have a part of a university course in teacher training (based on bebras tasks and activities with robotics)

• “The national curriculum was analyzed so that informatics teachers can teach using Bebras tasks, and textbooks were developed and published based on this. For this, we conducted relevant educational researches” (South Korea)

• “There are some tasks similar for bebras tasks used in primary school textbooks. For secondary schools usually textbooks concentrate on special topics and not include small tasks (as bebras tasks are)” (Lithuania)

• “A spiral curriculum of textbooks is available in Switzerland comprising currently of 13 books, further are being written, so the total will be 20 books from Kindergarten to Maturity (University entrance). Books for primary schools - where not related to programming - are using the approach of challenges to introduce and/or train a topic. Also, our brochures serve as a kind of textbook. They can be used in class and are prepared to be used by students and teachers. In 2019/2020 we also prepared special A5 cards with a task on the front side and the explanation and ?It?s Informatics? part on the back side. They were received very well” (Switzerland)

• “We wrote a book named - from computational thinking to programming (for higher education students and graduates)” (Turkey)

• “We applied to be part of a new series of textbooks on Informatics in our country” (Uzbekistan).

1.2 B.2 Task Creation

• “When introducing tasks in our teacher training process, not only problem solving but also problem making is used as an important learning activity. This draws a lot of consent from teachers” (South Korea)

• “We did several times with in-service, it was great but it takes time. Now we are doing with pre-service teachers (teacher students), they like to create similar Bebras tasks” (Lithuania)

• “In the years before we had a national workshop in preparation of the submission of task proposals to the international workshop where every submitter was invited. In the context of professional development for future high school teachers, we organized some workshops to first make them discover the contest and the activities, then help them create Bebras tasks for their pupils. Also the online environment (which is free for anybody) allows to create new tasks and to publish them to anyone by assigning a small key, which can be sent to those who you wish to solve the tasks.” (Switzerland).

1.3 B.3 Games

• “Bebras unplugged is a resource for learning, rather than an explicit game. It is a series of downloadable and printable cards that encourage students to develop CT skills as well as team work, collaboration and critical thinking. They are free to access on our website, and we have sets developed for each of the main age bands, except the oldest as it is least connected to the curriculum. While we provide guidance and additional worksheets to use these cards, it is up to the teachers as to how they want to implement them in a classroom” (Australia).

• Hungary provides two types of challenges. Shorter version (Treasure hunting) solving of 4 Bebras-tasks (handouts) - then with the code they can open a treasure box. Longer version: challenge game with 10 stations. In each station different activities - with physical game-parts (like board games, robots).

• “We created three different sets of “Bebras cards” for students from 7 to 13+ age. It is based on the idea of Bebras tasks. (Lithuania). “Bebras cards” are postcard-sized descriptions of activities and riddles based on Bebras tasks. They are meant for primary school teachers” (Switzerland).

• Ireland are preparing dynamic instances of Bebras tasks (multiple instances of the same task generated automatically, with difficulty level based on player’s ability). Planned as periodic (weekly activity). Not running yet (under development) but the plan is for use at school with the teacher in charge.

• South Korea has not yet realized a game (online), but has a plan to do so.

1.4 B.4 Assessment Tools

• Hungary created a test for first year students, and a course for improving CT skills.

• Also there are some attempts from PhD students in Austria to do this.

• “We developed an assessment tool” (Turkey).

1.5 B.5 CT Skills Training

• India does this during school visits.

• South Korea ran an offline Bebras camp.

• In Indonesia the training is conducted by Bebras Biro (universities that collaborate with NBO).

• In Canada the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing runs workshops in classrooms, from grades 7 to 12.