Information

What is the Bebras Challenge?

Bebras is an international student competition, a challenge, on Computational Thinking. In Cyprus is organized by the Cyprus Computer Society in cooperation with the ICT Teachers Association under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Athletics and Youth.

The goal is to promote Computational Thinking among students in a way that advances student ability beyond science and mathematical skills and enhance the students' analtyical, algorithmic and problem solving skills.  

The Challenge

• Is organized for the gymnasium and primary school  students (4th, 5th and 6th grades onyl) .  

• It is offered both in the Greek and English languages.

• Students from both the public and private schools can participate.

• is made up of 15-20 questions ranging in difficulty.

• Consists of two rounds

  • The first round is open for a whole week for students to attempt from the school or home without supervision.

  • The second round is organized in schools under supervision.

• The duration of each round is 75 minutes.

• Students are able to log back in after the challenge has closed, see their results and review the tasks.  

• Teachers and parents are able to register their students/children.

• Certificates of participation are given to all students.

• An awards ceremony is organized for the winners of each class. 

As ICT becomes a commonly used tool of education, this playful contest ensures that both boys and girls equally benefit from it. We are certain that Bebras encourages students to learn skills as well as enduring fundamental knowledge that will be helpful in their future studies and in life in general. 

History of BEBRAS

Bebras, the International Challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking is organized every year since 2004. It all started as an idea of Professor Valentina Dagiene of the University of Vilnius, Lithuania with the aim of promoting informatics education (Dagienė, 2010; Haberman, Cohen & Dagienė, 2011). 

Today, Bebras is an international initiative of the corresponding community (The Bebras Community, 2017), aiming at the development of informatics and Computational Thinking amongst educators and students. In many countries the competition is open to students at all levels from pre-primary school to lyceum. In Cyprus it was introduced in 2012 as a challenge amongst gymnasium students.  

An increasing number of countries is expressing interest in organizing national Bebras challenges as extra curricular activity. It is considered the most popular informatics activity globally. In 2017 it was organized in more than 40 countries with more than two millions participants (Bellettini et al., 2018).

In 2017, Cyprus organized successfully the Bebras International Tasks Workshop, the annual workshop of the Bebras community where representatives from member countries meet for a week to discuss and decide about the challenges available for selection in the national competitions.  

References: 

Haberman, B., Cohen, A., & Dagienė, V. (2011). The beaver contest: Attracting youngsters to study computing. In Proceedings of ITiCSE 2011, pages 378–378, Darmstadt, Germany. ACM.

Bellettini, C., Carimati, F., Lonati, V., Macoratti, R., Malchiodi, D., Monga, M., & Morpurgo, A. (2018). A Platform for the Italian Bebras. In CSEDU (1) (pp. 350-357).

The Bebras Community (2017). The Bebras international challenge on informatics and computational thinking. https://bebras.org. Last accessed  in January 2019.