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Developing a Two-Dimensional Categorization System for Educational Tasks in Informatics
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2017), pp. 23–44
Pub. online: 1 January 2017      Type: Research Article      Open accessOpen Access
Received
1 October 2016
Accepted
1 February 2017
Published
1 January 2017

Abstract

Computational thinking is an increasingly important focus in computer science or informatics curricula around the world, and ways of incorporating it into the school curricula are being sought. The Bebras contest on informatics, which originated 12 years ago and now involves around 50 countries, consists of short problem-solving tasks based on topics in informatics. Bebras tasks engender the development of computational thinking skills by incorporating abstraction, algorithmic thinking, decomposition, evaluation and generalization. Bebras tasks cover a range of informatics concepts including algorithms and data structures, programming, networking, databases and social and ethical issues. Having built up a substantial number of Bebras tasks over 12 years it is important to be able to categorize them so that they can be easily accessed by the Bebras community and teachers within schools. The categorization of tasks within Bebras is important as it ensures that tasks span a wide range of topics; there have been several categorization schemes suggested to date. In this paper we present a new two-dimensional categorization system that takes account of computational thinking skills as well as content knowledge. Examples are given from recent tasks that illustrate the role that Bebras can play in the development of computational thinking skills.

References

 
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Biographies

Dagienė Valentina
valentina.dagiene@mii.vu.lt

V. Dagienė is a professor and principal researcher at Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics. She has published over 200 scientific papers and more than 50 textbooks in informatics for high schools. She has been working in various expert groups and work groups, organizing the olympiads in informatics among students, also engaged in localization of software and educational programs, e-learning, and problem solving. She is an Executive Editor of international journals Informatics in Education and Olympiads in Informatics. She has participated in several EU-funded R&D projects, as well as in a number of national research studies connected with technology and education.

Sentance Sue
sue.sentance@kcl.ac.uk

S. Sentance is a senior lecturer in computer science education at King’s College London in the UK. She has considerable experience in training pre-service and in-service teachers of computer science. She has authored a range of papers on teacher professional development and curriculum change in Computing and works with the Bebras team in the UK.

Stupurienė Gabrielė
gabriele.stupuriene@mii.vu.lt

G. Stupurienė is a doctoral student at Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Department of Informatics Methodology. She has been working with Bebras challenge since 2010. As a Master student she worked on Conceptualization of Informatics Fundamentals through Bebras Tasks of earlier years. Her main research focus is developing informatics concepts based educational model for schools.


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Open access article under the CC BY license.

Keywords
Bebras contest computational thinking informatics concepts informatics education categorization databases

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