Bebras Competition
The International Bebras Challenge on Informatics is an annual computer science competition for primary and secondary school students around the world. With 87 member countries and more than 2.5 million participating students in 2024, the competition is the largest computer science competition in the world. The Bebras competition adds new countries every year. [1]
Format
[edit]The Bebras is a 45-minute multiple-choice test with 15 problems. The problems are divided into three pairs of 5, and classified as "easy", "medium" and "hard". In most countries, the competition is administered through a web system that automatically scores each participant's work. The pool of Bebras problems is agreed upon during the annual international "Bebras Task Workshop" by the representatives of all member countries.[2]
History
[edit]Originally founded by the University of Vilnius and first administered in Lithuania in 2004, the Bebras competition is named after Lithuanian word "Bebras" which translates to "beaver". The competition has been subject of research and several dozen publications.[3][4][2]
In 2015 the Bebras organization was awarded the Microsoft-sponsored "Best Practices in Education Award" by Informatics Europe.[5] In 2019 Google awarded Bebras Indonesia a $1 million grant to support the program and further train teachers in the field of computer science.[6]
By 2022, there were two and a half million global participants.[1]
Bebras in the United Kingdom
[edit]The "Bebras Computing Challenge" is organized by the University of Oxford and backed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the United Kingdom and has more than 300,000 annual participants. Students with a score in the top 10% of their relative age group are invited to sit the Oxford University Computing Challenge.[1]
Members
[edit]As of 2024, there are 60 full members and 27 provisional members.
Full members
[edit]
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belarus (suspended in April 2022)
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
China
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Egypt
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
Montenegro
Netherlands
New Zealand
North Macedonia
Pakistan
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia (suspended in April 2022)
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
Provisional members
[edit]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c "Computer scientists are country's top problem solvers". The Northern Echo. February 2022. Retrieved 2022-08-13.
- ^ a b Izu, Cruz; Mirolo, Claudio; Settle, Amber; Mannila, Linda; Stupurienė, Gabrielė (2017-04-15). "Exploring Bebras Tasks Content and Performance: A Multinational Study". Informatics in Education. 16 (1): 39–59. doi:10.15388/infedu.2017.03. hdl:11390/1124052. ISSN 1648-5831.
- ^ Pluhár, Zsuzsa; Gellér, Barnabás (2018). Auer, Michael E.; Guralnick, David; Simonics, Istvan (eds.). "International Informatic Challenge in Hungary". Teaching and Learning in a Digital World. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. 716. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 425–435. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-73204-6_47. ISBN 978-3-319-73204-6.
- ^ Boom, Kay-Dennis; Bower, Matt; Arguel, Amaël; Siemon, Jens; Scholkmann, Antonia (2018-07-02). "Relationship between computational thinking and a measure of intelligence as a general problem-solving ability". Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (PDF). ITiCSE 2018. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 206–211. doi:10.1145/3197091.3197104. ISBN 978-1-4503-5707-4. S2CID 195351553.
- ^ "Bebras wins Informatics Europe 2015 Best Practices in Education Award". Informatics Europe. 20 October 2015. Retrieved 2022-08-02.
- ^ Afifa, Laila (2020-02-18). "Google Donates 13 Billion for Teacher Training". Tempo. Retrieved 2022-08-13.