Bebras International Challenge for Informatics and Computational Thinking
Bebras is an international project to promote computational thinking among school students of all ages (5-19 years), and UiB is the hub of the Bebras initiative in Norway!
Hovedinnhold
Bebras Norge aim to tackle a big societal challenge today – introducing teachers, parents and students to computational thinking.
What is the Bebras Challenge?
The Bebras Challenge is an international initiative working to promote informatics, computer science, and computational thinking among school children at all ages. The goal of the Bebras Challenge is to let the school students figure out what computational thinking is and have a good time. No prior knowledge is expected or needed, and there is a different set of tasks for the different age groups.
Participants are usually supervised by teachers who may integrate the Bebras challenge in their teaching activities as they are made to fit the syllabus. It takes no more than 45 minutes, and the challenge is performed at schools using computers or a mobile device. The challenge can be conducted anytime during the two weeks of the challenge, and the tasks will be made available and completed online.
The teachers will receive answers to each task, an explanation of how the answer could be obtained, as well as a section on how the tasks are related to computational thinking.
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Why promote computational thinking?
The core of computational thinking is simple, it is basically solving problems. It is a problem-solving technique which is useful across all disciplines, including maths, science and humanities, but also in everyday life. Computational thinking train kids to solve problems in a structured way, and gives them the confidence to tackle problems of a larger scale. For a further explanation of Computational thinking, check out Google for Education.
How does a country become a part of the Bebras Initiative?
For a country to join the Bebras initiative they have to mainly complete two things:
- Organize the national challenge in the country,
- And participate at the the International Task Workshop.
This is already taken care of by the Professor Frances Rosamond, as she has set up a consortium to bring Bebras to Norway, AND had two brilliant Norwegian IT-teachers participate at the workshop. This means that the tasks for the challenge has been picked out, processed to fit the Norwegian syllabus and the different age groups, refined and translated. Now it’s only up to you as a teacher to sign up your school and have your students participate!