Bobřík informatiky

Welcome to the Czech website of the contest "Bobřík informatiky".

The Beaver of Informatics is a contest organized for high and secondary school students. The contest is similar to the one of Mathematical Kangaroo and offers not only the possibility to compete but to popularise school informatics as at school as among students – fans of computing. The main goal of the contest is to show students and their teachers the whole rank of informatics which is often reduced to digital literacy and to show them which knowledge and skills are required from IT specialists. Another aim is to turn attention to the basis of informatics as science so that schools would be able to form students prepared to IT university studies having an undistorted idea of „computer science studies“.

The contest is a member of a cluster of national contests of the same aim and similar organization. About 20 countries organized the contest last year. The international web for the whole cluster is placed at www.bebras.org. Common character of the contest in these countries was due to the acceptance of an international standard valid for the whole cluster with a common methodological centre that set up non-committal rules and recommended a set of problems. The problems were composed of problems taken out of the common database as well as from each country´s own resources.

In the contest, students fill in an online test on a web browser. The test took 40 minutes and contained 15 tasks with 4 answers to be selected. Several problems allowed solving by working in an interactive program which is a part of setting. Participants are split into age categories (or school grade categories): Benjamin (about 11 – 13 years old), Kadet (14 – 15 years old), Junior (16-17 years old) and Senior (18-19 years old).

The national contest is held every November, each category an extra day. In 2012, the 5-th national contest is prepared. In three last years, a number of participants were: 2008: 4048, 2009: 10351, 2010: 14867, 2011: 19280.

About 90 participants of them were winners in 2011 (they answered all tasks correctly). More than 210 schools from every region of the Czech Republic participated in 2011. A ratio of girl participants is more than 40 %.

The tasks come from 4 areas: algorithmization, information comprehension, digital literacy (including social tasks) and problem solving (including logical and mathematical background of informatics). The archive of tasks and tests is accessible under the link Archiv (of course only in Czech).

Contest tasks were taken partly from international Bebras task database. We prepared 57 tasks in 2012: 14 own Czech tasks, 8 tasks from Slovakia, 7 from Germany, 6 tasks from the Netherlands, 5 from Switzerland, 4 from Lithuania and Ukraina, 3 from Japan, 2 tasks from Austria and 1 task from Estonia, Italy, Israel and Poland. Thank you very much!

The guarantee of the national contest is the Department of Informatics at the Faculty of Education, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (www.pf.jcu.cz). The methodical collaborator is The Unit of School Informaticians, the Czech professional corporation of ICT teachers (www.jsi.cz). The contest is supported by Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic.

There are some papers about the contest written in English which are available to download.

• TOMCSÁNYI, P., VANÍČEK, J. Implementation of informatics contest bebras in Czechia and Slovakia.
• TOMCSÁNYI, P., VANÍČEK, J. International comparison of problems from an informatics contest.

You can look at photo gallery from last 2 years (link Fotoreportaz in the menu Nabidka on the left).

The others pages on the web are unfortunately available only in Czech language. You can try use automatic translation:
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