Post Syndicated from Andrew Csizmadia original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/join-the-uk-bebras-challenge-2026/

The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest computing challenge, is back!

Last year, more than 526,000 students from across the UK took part, tackling fun and thought-provoking puzzles that introduce key ideas in computational thinking with no extra preparation needed.

Read on to learn how your school can get involved.

What is the UK Bebras Challenge?

The UK Bebras Challenge is a free-to-enter annual challenge that is designed to spark interest in both computational thinking and computer science among students aged 6 to 19. The 45-minute challenge is accessible to everyone, offering age-appropriate but challenging interactive tasks for students at different levels, including a tailored version for secondary students with severe sight impairments.

The tasks are designed to give every student the opportunity to showcase their potential and all participating students receive a certificate. There are also certificates based on performance within school and gold certificates based on national boundaries. With self-marking tasks and no text-based programming required, it’s easy to have your school participate in the UK Bebras Challenge.

“The UK Bebras challenge provides an engaging way for students to apply their problem-solving skills in a fun, competitive environment. It complements our coding curriculum, encouraging critical thinking and enhancing computational thinking,” – Jonathan Phillips from Hereford Cathedral School

A new way to celebrate your achievements

Every student who takes part in the UK Bebras Challenge gets a certificate. This year, we’ve come up with a new way to celebrate schools too. Every school who takes part will now get a digital badge and can earn others for reaching participation milestones.

The badges categories are:

• 2026 UK Bebras Challenge participants
• 100 students take part
• 250 students
• 500 students
• 1,000+ students
• 5 years running the challenge (starting this year)
• Running the Severe Sight Impairment (SSI) challenge

With the exception of the ‘5 years’ badge, the numbers aren’t cumulative year-on-year and reset for each new challenge year. Claiming the badges is easy: Once the results are processed, we’ll email you a link where you can download your badge and display it wherever you want.

Feel free to brag about your new badges online. It might encourage other schools to take part next year 😀

Go deeper with Ada Computer Science

Each Bebras task’s background section is now linked to a related topic on the Ada Computer Science platform. Following the live challenge, teachers and students can explore ithe detailed explanation of the computer science concept behind each Bebras task, along with the computational thinking skills students may use to solve that task.

“We have thoroughly enjoyed delivering the UK Bebras Challenge at our school. It has been an invaluable resource and by participating in this exciting event, our students have been introduced to the world of computational thinking in a fun and engaging way. The challenges are designed to push students to think critically and creatively, developing essential problem-solving skills that are applicable both inside and outside of the classroom.” – Sharon Pendreigh from Brownedge St Mary’s Catholic High School

How do I get my school involved?

If you are either a UK school or teach a UK-based curriculum, then visit the UK Bebras website for more information and to register your school.

Once you’ve registered, you’ll get access to the entire UK Bebras set of questions from previous years, allowing you to create custom quizzes for your students to tackle at any time throughout the year. These quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results to keep track of their progress. The questions are perfect for enrichment activities, end-of-term quizzes, lesson starters, and even full lessons to develop computational thinking skills and promote computing concepts.

Register for free at bebras.uk/admin.

Have a go at one of our puzzles

Here’s a question we ran in 2018 for the Juniors group (ages 10 to 12). Can you solve it?

Park walk

This is the map of a park:

The green circles with letters represent the trees and the brown lines are paths. Note that some letters are used to label more than one tree. Walking from tree F to tree B can be described as F D E C A B.

Last Sunday two families walked in the park.

The Wilde family’s walk was B A A A C E D E E D A.

The Gilde family’s walk was F D C D A E A D E D A.

Both families started their walks at the same time.

Walking from one tree to another tree, down one path takes the same amount of time.

Question:

How many times did the two families meet at a tree?

Answer

They never met at any of the trees.

Explanation

Computer scientists often use graphs (and then they speak about vertices and edges instead of trees and paths connecting them).

Another interesting point about this task is the representation of the walks in the park. Despite the fact that some of the trees (vertices) are marked by the same letter, the walks that start from B or F can be unambiguously described by the sequence of letters along the walk. It means that one sequence of letters describes only one walk. It is because the neighbours of each tree (neighbours of tree X are the trees that are directly connected to X by a path) are always labeled with different letters. So if we know where we are at some moment of the walk and we see the next letter in the walk’s representation then there is no doubt which tree we should visit next.

This Bebras task was developed by the Bebras team in South Korea and refined by members of the international Bebras community.

In 1936, a Hungarian mathematician called Dénes Kőnig wrote the first ever textbook on graph theory. Today, graph theory is fundamental to computer science and in particular networking, operation research and data structures.

Did you get it right?

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2026 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Post Syndicated from Andrew Csizmadia original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/join-the-uk-bebras-challenge-2025/

The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest computing competition, is back! Schools can enter now for this year’s Challenge, which runs from 10 to 21 November.

Last year, more than 467,000 students from across the UK took part, tackling fun and thought-provoking puzzles that introduce key ideas in computational thinking with no extra preparation needed.

Read on to learn how your school can get involved.

What is the UK Bebras Challenge?

The UK Bebras Challenge is a free-to-enter annual challenge that is designed to spark interest in both computational thinking and computer science among students aged 6 to 19. The 45-minute challenge is accessible to everyone, offering age-appropriate but challenging interactive tasks for students at different levels, including a tailored version for students with severe sight impairments. 

The tasks are designed to give every student the opportunity to showcase their potential and all participating students receive a certificate. There are also certificates based on performance within school and gold certificates based on national boundaries. With self-marking tasks and no text-based programming required, it’s easy to have your school participate in the UK Bebras Challenge.

This year, each task’s background section is linked to the Ada Computer Science platform. Teachers and students can now explore detailed explanations of the computing concepts behind the Bebras tasks, along with the computational thinking skills students may use to solve them.

“Bebras provides us with incredibly useful insights and conversations about our students who might otherwise have struggled with accessing traditional CS materials. It’s also a great resource for baseline tests where students may not have studied the curriculum the way we present it.” – Teacher in the UK

“I think the problems are a really great way to promote critical thinking, computational thinking, and logic in general. I have only seen a couple but I am very impressed and excited to share with some of my students. Thanks for what you are doing.” – Teacher in the UK

What does a UK Bebras task look like?

The tasks are inspired by classic computing problems and presented in a fun, age-appropriate way. For example, younger students aged 6 to 8 might solve the mystery of a dancing doll, while older students aged 16 to 19 could take on the challenge of an art theft. Both of these tasks involve the use of data structures.

Here’s a question we ran in 2021 for the Juniors group (ages 10 to 12). Can you solve it? 

Beaver farmer

Farmer Mert grows wheat in the fields, which contain a symbol in the map below.

He also has stony fields where nothing grows, shown by the  symbol.

To save water, Mert only wants to water the wheat fields. He can block the water channels coming from the lake at the spots marked with the letters A to J.

The water will only flow downwards towards the fields and will never flow back towards the lake.

Task

Select the letters to block the water from flowing to the empty fields while still letting it flow to the wheat fields.

Example answer

The correct answer is that spots labelled B, F, H, and J must be closed, as shown in the following figure:

Explanation

If none of the gates are closed, the water will reach the stony fields. If more gates than shown above are closed, then some wheat fields will get no water. If we review all spots:

• A must be open to allow water to flow to field 1.
• B has to be closed to avoid watering field 2. It also brings water to field 3, but this field can also get it through C.
• C must be open both for field 4 and for field 3, which cannot be watered though A since B is closed.
• D must be open for fields 7 and 8.
• E must also be open field 7.
• F must be closed to prevent water flowing to field 5.
• G, if closed, would only prevent field 3 from being watered and so must be open as well.
• H must also be closed even if F is also closed, as water can flow from the open D and E.
• I must be open for field 11.
• J has to be closed to prevent fields 9 and 10 from getting watered.

This Bebras task was developed by the Bebras team in Turkey and refined by members of the international Bebras community.

Did you get it right?

How do I get my school involved?

If you are either a UK school or teach a UK-based curriculum, then visit the UK Bebras website for more information and to register your school. 

Once you’ve registered, you’ll get access to the entire UK Bebras back catalogue of questions, allowing you to create custom quizzes for your students to tackle at any time throughout the year. These quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results to keep track of their progress. The questions are perfect for enrichment activities, end-of-term quizzes, lesson starters, and even full lessons to develop computational thinking skills and promote computing concepts.

Join for free at bebras.uk/admin.

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2025 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Post Syndicated from Andrew Csizmadia original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/uk-bebras-challenge-2024/

The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest computing competition, is back and open for entries from schools. This year’s challenge will be open for entries from 4–15 November. Last year, over 400,000 students from across the UK took part. Read on to learn how your school can get involved.

What is UK Bebras?

UK Bebras is a free-to-enter annual competition that is designed to spark interest in computational thinking among students aged 6 to 19 by providing engaging and thought-provoking activities. The 45-minute challenge is accessible to everyone, offering age-appropriate interactive questions for students at different levels, including a tailored version for students with severe sight impairments. 

The questions are designed to give every student the opportunity to showcase their potential, whether they excel in maths or computing, or not. With self-marking questions and no programming required, it’s easy for schools to participate.

“Thank you for another fantastic Bebras event! My students have really enjoyed it. This is the first year that one of my leadership team actually did the Bebras to understand what we are preparing the children for — she was very impressed!” Reference 5487

“I really enjoyed doing the Bebras challenge yesterday. It was the most accessible it’s ever been for me as a braillist/screen reader user.” Reference 5372

What does a UK Bebras question look like?

The questions are inspired by classic computing problems but are presented in a fun, age-appropriate way. For instance, a puzzle for 6- to 8-year-olds might involve guiding a hungry tortoise along the most efficient path across a lawn, while 16- to 19-year-olds could be asked to sort members for quiz teams based on who knows who — a challenging problem relating to graph theory.

Here’s a question we ran in 2023 for the Castors group (ages 8 to 10). Can you solve it? 

Planting carrots

A robotic rabbit is planting carrot seeds in these four earth mounds.

It can respond to these commands:

	jump left to the next mound
	jump right to the next mound
	plant a carrot seed in the mound you are on

Here is a sequence of commands for the rabbit:

We don’t know which mound the rabbit started on, but we do know that, when it followed this sequence, it placed each of three carrot seeds on different mounds.

Question: 

Which picture shows how the carrot seeds could have been planted by the robot following the sequence of commands?

Example puzzle answer

The correct answer is:

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

After executing the first two commands

the rabbit places the seed on the mound to the far right:

It then executes the commands

and lays the next seed:

Then it jumps to the left twice and lays the last seed

So the carrot seeds will be on the hills in the order:

Did you get it right?

How do I get my school involved?

Visit the UK Bebras website for more information and to register your school. Once you’ve registered, you’ll get access to the entire UK Bebras back catalogue of questions, allowing you to create custom quizzes for your students to tackle at any time throughout the year. These quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results to keep track of their progress. Schools have found these questions perfect for enrichment activities, end-of-term quizzes, lesson starters, and even full lessons to develop computational thinking skills.

Join for free at bebras.uk/admin.

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2024 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

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.

---

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.

---

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

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2022 for schools appeared first on Raspberry Pi.