Abstract
Education needs to provoke young people to be active participants of modern society and contribute to changing and shaping the world. The international Bebras initiative, with over 70 countries participating, is one of the successful approaches involving school students in solving problems of computer science and deep thinking. In 2021, Finland, Hungary and India, supported by Lithuania, started a research study on solving Bebras tasks integrated into the Finnish virtual learning environment ViLLE using learning analytics. In this paper, we describe the methodology of the research study and two pilots conducted in Hungary and India with 1548 participants in total. A detailed analysis of Hungarian Bebras Challenge run in November 2021 in the ViLLE environment is provided. Results of 33,467 students aged 9–18 are discussed using task difficulty, gender, and time as the underlying variables. Also, a brief overview of feedback from teachers and students on using the ViLLE environment is given. The results from the pilots and from the Hungarian Bebras Challenge show that the ViLLE environment supports the task solving process of the Bebras Challenge and easy adaptive to different languages and task sets.
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Appendices
Appendix A - Schemas
The schema for the process of organizing a Bebras Challenge in ViLLE
Appendix B - Figures Representing Data in Hungarian Bebras Challenge 2021
Map of the participation in the Bebras Challenge 2021 in Hungary
Participation in Hungarian Bebras Challenge by age group (2011–2021).
The standard deviations of scores in each age group
Age group | Number of participants (girls/boys) | Mean of scores (girls/boys) | Standard deviation of scores (girls/boys) |
---|---|---|---|
Little Beavers (9–10) | 1760 (833/927) | 66.60 (67.61/65.69) | 27.11 (26.64/27.50) |
Benjamins (11–12) | 7963 (3859/4104) | 104.31 (104.41/104.22) | 41.56 (40.56/42.47) |
Cadets (13–14) | 8469 (4275/4194) | 118.35 (118.30/118.40) | 42.09 (40.66/43.51) |
Juniors (15–16) | 12491 (5929/6562) | 111.25 (110.21/112.20) | 35.62 (34.61/36.49) |
Seniors (17–18) | 2784 (808/1976) | 93.98 (89.06/96.00) | 30.80 (28.19/31.59) |
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Pluhár, Z. et al. (2022). Bebras Challenge in a Learning Analytics Enriched Environment: Hungarian and Indian Cases. In: Bollin, A., Futschek, G. (eds) Informatics in Schools. A Step Beyond Digital Education. ISSEP 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13488. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15851-3_4
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