Challenge to Promote Deep Understanding in ICT
The international Bebras challenge on informatics and computational thinking is well-known in over fifty countries as an informal school activity. Running the contest annually for more than ten years, we have noticed that the students (and their teachers)
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Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, 08663 Vilnius, Lithuania [email protected]
Abstract. The international Bebras challenge on informatics and computational thinking is well-known in over fifty countries as an informal school activity. Running the contest annually for more than ten years, we have noticed that the students (and their teachers) consider the activities as a very exciting learning experience in problem solving and increased understanding of what lies beyond ICT. The crucial point of the challenge is the tasks: they focus mainly on the informatics (computer science) concepts and help in understanding beyond tech‐ nology, they are short, attractive, and answerable in a few minutes; some of them have multiple-choice answers or are open-ended, and others have interactive components (solving by dragging, clicking, sorting, etc.). The performance of the Bebras challenge in many countries during the last years has shown a high accept‐ ance by school students at all levels. The challenge also involves a fairly high number of female participants. Keywords: ICT and human development problems · ICT and gender · Digital literacy · Deep learning · Informatics education · Problem solving
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Introduction
The status of informatics (computer science or computing) education as a deep under‐ standing of information and communication technology (ICT) is unsatisfactory in many countries [1]. Although computers, applications and ICT in general are an increasingly natural part of the everyday work in schools, the focus is mainly oriented toward the basic digital literacy skills while the underlying principles are left uncovered. Bringing informatics and ICT as a creative subject to schools through curriculum changes in the form of a formal track is essential, but it takes time especially when changes are reflected in a top-down way. Non-formal and informal ways are much faster and could involve a number of voluntary activities. We can enumerate an increased number of initiatives, e.g., CS Unplugged, code.org, Code academy, Hour of Code, aiming at making informatics and ICT creativity accessible to everyone. The Bebras challenge on informatics and computational thinking is another similar activity [2]. The Bebras (Beaver in English) is an annual contest held in parallel in schools in many European countries and all over the world (e.g. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, USA). It provides motivated and game-like tasks in the format of multiple-choice questions, open-ended problems, and interactive tasks where students answer by doing actions, dragging and dropping objects, drawing © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved F.J. Mata and A. Pont (Eds.): WITFOR 2016, IFIP AICT 481, pp. 47–52, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44447-5_5
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shapes, clicking on particular items, setting puzzles, writing answers in text boxes, etc. [3]. The name “Beaver” –
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