The Bebras Computing Challenge introduces computational thinking to students. It is organised in 50 countries and designed to get students all over the world excited about computing. It runs online every November, is free to enter and you can enter as many students in your school as you like. See http://bebras.uk for more information. This year over 140,000 students took part in the UK alone!
To accompany/support the Bebras competition, with funding from Google, we produced some colourful Bebras cards for use in the Computing classroom with children aged 7-11 (KS2 in England). This means children can enjoy Bebras-style activities all year round! The cards are adapted from those developed and trialled in Lithuania. Each set consists of 48 A5 laminated cards in a box, each with a different computational thinking/computer science challenge. The intention is that children can work in groups to solve the puzzles on the cards and this will help them to develop logical and algorithmic thinking skills as well as introduce them to some new computer science concepts.
Bebras Cards are freely available to download and print from http://bebras.uk – the UK Bebras site. The password to access the answers is Algorithm. Do try them out! Bebras puzzles are fun to try to solve and also all related to computer science in some way. The intention is to engage students in computational thinking and stimulate an interest in Computing.
As part of this project, we printed and distributed 350 sets of cards to primary schools in September. We are now asking the recipients of these cards to complete a short survey on their use and we will report on how they were received. Each pack contains 48 puzzles, an index and some instructions/suggestions on how to use them, and has a symbol on them that indicates whether they are easy/medium/hard and have a topic indicator too (eg algorithms, logic, etc.).
Follow @bebras_uk on twitter where many schools have commented on their use of the cards and about the actual online competition in November.
Sue Sentance 