Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/uk-bebras-challenge-2023/

The UK Bebras Challenge is back and ready to accept entries from schools for its annual event, which runs from 6 to 17 November.

More than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge in 2022. In the UK alone, over 365,000 students participated. Read on to find out how you can get your school involved.

“This is now an annual event for our Year 5 and 6 students, and one of the things I actually love about it is the results are not always what you might predict. There are children who have a clear aptitude for these puzzles who find this is their opportunity to shine!”

– Claire Rawlinson, Primary Teacher, Lancashire

What is the Bebras Challenge?

Bebras is a free, annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their students. No programming is involved, and it’s completely free for schools to enter. All Bebras questions are self-marking.

We’re making Bebras accessible by offering age-appropriate challenges for different school levels and a challenge tailored for visually impaired students. Schools can enter students from age 6 to 18 and know they’ll get interesting and challenging (but not too challenging) activities. 

Students aged 10 to 18 who do particularly well will get invited to the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC).

What is the thinking behind Bebras?

We want young people to get excited about computing. Through Bebras, they will learn about computational and logical thinking by answering questions and solving problems.

Bebras questions are based on classic computing problems and are presented in a friendly, age-appropriate way. For example, an algorithm-based puzzle for learners aged 6 to 8 is presented in terms of a hungry tortoise finding an efficient eating path across a lawn; for 16- to 18-year-olds, a difficult problem based on graph theory asks students to sort out quiz teams by linking quizzers who know each other.

“This has been a really positive experience. Thank you. Shared results with Head and Head of Key Stage 3. Really useful for me when assessing Key Stage 4 options.”

– Secondary teacher, North Yorkshire

Can you solve our example Bebras puzzle?

Here’s a Bebras question for the Castors category (ages 8 to 10) from 2021. You will find the answer at the end of this blog. 

Cleaning

A robot picks up litter.

1. The robot moves to the closest piece of litter and picks it up.
2. It then moves to the next closest piece of litter and picks it up.
3. It carries on in this way until all the litter has been picked up.

Question: Which kind of litter will the robot pick up last?

How do I get my school involved in Bebras?

The Bebras challenge for UK schools takes place from 6 to 17 November. Register at bebras.uk/admin to get free access to the challenge.

By registering, you also get access to the Bebras back catalogue of questions, from which you can build your own quizzes to use in your school at any time during the year. All the quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results for your mark book. Schools have reported using these questions for end-of-term activities, lesson starters, and schemes of lessons about computational thinking.

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Puzzle answer

The answer to the example puzzle is:

The image below shows the route the robot takes by following the instructions:

The post Take part in the UK Bebras Challenge 2023 for schools appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Post Syndicated from Chris Roffey original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/uk-bebras-oxford-university-computing-challenge-2022/

Today we share a guest blog from Chris Roffey, who manages the UK Bebras Challenge, a computational thinking challenge we run every year in partnership with the University of Oxford.

Bebras is a free annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their learners through online, self-marking tasks. Taking part in Bebras, students solve accessible, interesting problems using their developing computational thinking skills. No programming is involved in taking part. The UK challenge is for school students aged 6 to 18 years old, with a special category for students with severe visual impairments.

Preparing the UK Bebras Challenge for schools

While UK schools take part in Bebras throughout two weeks in November, for me the annual cycle starts much earlier. May is the time of the annual Bebras international workshop where the year’s new tasks get decided. In 2022, 60 countries were represented — some online, some in person. For nearly a week, computer scientists and computing teachers met to discuss and work on the new cycle’s task proposals submitted by participating countries a little earlier.

After the workshop, in collaboration with teams from other European countries, the UK Bebras team chose its task sets and then worked to localise, copy-edit, and test them to get them ready for schools participating in Bebras during November. From September, schools across the UK create accounts for their students, with over 360,000 students ultimately taking part in 2022. All in all, more than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the 2022/2023 Bebras challenge cycle.

An invitation to the Oxford University Computing Challenge

In this cycle, the UK Bebras partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the University of Oxford has been extended to include the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC). This is an invitation-based, online coding challenge for students aged 10 to 18, offered in the UK as well as Australia, Jamaica, and China. We invited the students with the top 10% best results in the UK Bebras challenge to take part in the OUCC — an exciting opportunity for them.

In contrast to Bebras, which doesn’t require participants to do any coding, the OUCC asks students to create code to solve computational thinking problems. This requires students to prepare and challenges them to develop their computational thinking skills further. The two younger age groups, 10- to 14-year-olds, solve problems using the Blockly programming language. The older two age groups can use one of the 11 programming languages that Bebras supports, including all the most common ones taught in UK schools.

Over 20,000 Bebras participants took up the invitation to the first round of the OUCC in the third week of January. Then in March, the top 20 participants from each of the four OUCC age groups took part in the final round. The finalists all did amazingly well. In the first round, many of them had solved all the available tasks correctly, even though the expectation is that participants only try to solve as many as they can within the round’s time limit. In the final round, a few of the finalists managed to repeat this feat with the even more advanced tasks — which is, in modern parlance, literally impossible!

Celebrating together

Many of the participants are about to take school exams, so the last stage of the annual cycle — the prize winners’ celebration day— takes place when the exam period has ended. This year we are holding this celebration on Friday 30 June at the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s headquarters in Cambridge. It will be a lovely way to finish the annual Bebras cycle and I am looking forward to it immensely.

The post UK Bebras participants in the Oxford University Computing Challenge appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Post Syndicated from Chris Roffey original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/computational-thinking-resources-uk-bebras-2022/

This November, teachers across the UK helped 367,023 learners participate in the annual free UK Bebras Challenge of computational thinking.

We support this challenge in the UK, together with Oxford University, and Bebras Challenges run across the world, with more than 3 million learners from schools in 54 countries taking part in 2021. Bebras encourages a love of computational thinking, computer science, and problem solving, especially among learners who haven’t yet realised they have these skills.

More and more schools are taking part in the UK Bebras Challenge

Nearly every year since 2013, more UK schools have been participating in Bebras. We think this is because for teachers, registering and entering learners is easy, the online system does all the marking automatically, and teachers receive comprehensive results that can be helpful for assessment.

The computational thinking problems within Bebras are tailored for different age groups, use clear language, and are accessible to colour-blind learners. There is also a challenge for learners with visual impairments. Teachers who run Bebras in their schools seem to love it and regularly tell colleagues about it. 

“Our pupils really enjoy [Bebras] and I find it so helpful to teach computational thinking with real-life strategies. We also find the data and information about our pupils’ performance extremely helpful.” — Teacher in London

Age-appropriate computational thinking problems

In the UK Bebras Challenge, the younger learners aged 6 to 10 usually take part in teams and have plenty of time to discuss how to solve the computational thinking problems they are presented with.

Older learners, aged 10 to 18, try to solve as many problems as they can in 40 minutes. The problems they are presented with start off easy and get increasingly difficult. The 10% of participants who solve the most problems are then invited to take part in the Oxford University Computing Challenge (OUCC), an annual programming challenge.

Year-round free resources for teachers

Although the OUCC is only open to some Bebras participants, all of the OUCC problems are archived and teachers registered with Bebras can use them to make auto-marking quizzes for all of their learners at any time of the year. Part of the goal of UK Bebras is to support teachers with free resources, and the UK Bebras online quizzes facility now has computational thinking tasks from the Bebras archive, plus auto-marking Blockly programming problems and text-based programming problems, which can be solved using commonly taught programming languages.

If you want to get a taste of Bebras, check out some of the interactive challenges that require no registration. And if you’d like to register to make quizzes for your learners and find out about next year’s challenge, you can do so at bebras.uk/admin.

The post Computational thinking all year round with UK Bebras appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/uk-bebras-challenge-2022/

The UK Bebras Challenge is back and ready to accept entries from schools for its annual event from 7 to 18 November.

More than 3 million students from 54 countries took part in the Bebras Challenge in 2021. Read on to find out how you can get your school involved.

What is Bebras?

Bebras a free, annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their students. No programming is involved, and it’s completely free for schools to take part. All Bebras questions are self-marking. Schools can enter students from age 6 to 18 and know they’ll get interesting and challenging (but not too challenging) activities.

“This has been a really positive experience. Thank you. Shared results with head and Head of KS3. Really useful for me when assessing KS4 options.” – Secondary teacher, North Yorkshire

We’re making Bebras accessible by offering age-appropriate challenges for different school levels, and a challenge tailored for visually impaired students.

What is the idea behind Bebras?

We want young people to get excited about computing. Through Bebras, they will learn about computational and logical thinking by answering questions and solving puzzles.

Bebras questions are based on classic computing problems and presented in friendly, age-appropriate contexts. For example, an algorithm-based puzzle for learners aged 6 to 8 is presented in terms of a hungry tortoise find an efficient eating path across a lawn; for 16- to 18-year-olds, a difficult question based on graph theory asks students to sort out some quiz teams by linking quizzers who know each other.

Can you solve the example puzzle?

Here’s a question from the 2021 challenge for the Junior category (ages 10 to 12). You’ll find the correct answer at the bottom of this blog post. 

Science Fair

• Bebras High School is having a science fair.
• All the events in the fair need to follow a specific order, and only one event can be held at a time.
• The diagram below shows all the events that must be included in the flow of the science fair.

• The arrows between events indicate that the event the arrow is drawn from has to occur before the event the arrow points to. For example, ‘Social Interaction’ can only happen after both ‘Opening Speeches’ and ‘Project Presentations’ have finished.

Question: What is the correct order of events for the science fair?

How do I get my school involved?

The Bebras challenge for UK schools takes place from 7 to 18 November. Register at bebras.uk/admin to get full access to the challenge.

By registering, you also get access to the back catalogue of questions, from which you can build your own quizzes to use in your school at any time during the year. All the quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results for your mark book. Schools have reported using the back catalogue of questions for end-of-term activities, lesson starters, and schemes of lessons about computational thinking.

You can also see more of our free resources for Computing and Computer Science teachers, and find out about our newest research project, which you can get involved in if you teach primary Computing.

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There are actually two possible answers to the example puzzle:

Option 1	Option 2
Chorus Performance Preparation of Stands Opening Speeches Project Presentations Social Interaction Referee Reviews Awarding Prizes	Preparation of Stands Chorus Performance Opening Speeches Project Presentations Social Interaction Referee Reviews Awarding Prizes

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