Students' performance on programming-related tasks in an informatics contest in Finland, Sweden and Lithuania

Abstract

The ways in which informatics is covered in K-12 education vary among European countries. In Finland and Sweden, informatics is not included in the core curriculum, whereas, for example, in Lithuania, all students are exposed to some informatics concepts starting in the fifth grade. Bebras is an annually arranged international informatics contest for K-12 level, resulting in a large collection of data about contestants and their results. In this paper, we analyse contest data from the Finnish, Swedish and Lithuanian 2013 contests, focusing on students' performance on tasks related to algorithmic thinking. Our findings suggest that despite coming from different educational systems, students perform rather similarly on the tasks. The same tasks are difficult and the thinking behind picking an incorrect answer seems rather similar throughout the countries. The analysis also points out that there is a lack of easy questions -this needs to be fixed in order to not risk scaring students away.

Concepts in K-9 Computer Science Education

“…For instance, the classification system might be useful to future task developers. Moreover, it would be interesting to investigate whether our task classification can be used to refine existing transnational comparative studies such as [27].…”

A Comparison of Preschool and Elementary School Children Learning Computer Science Concepts through a Multilanguage Robot Programming Platform

“…However, older children performed better on complex programming that required several conditions or events. Dagiene et al [5] compared students from Finland, Sweden and Lithuania ages 7 to 12 performing similar algorithmic thinking tasks exercises. Using multiple choice questions, they evaluated concepts such as graphs, search algorithms, data structures, and executing sequences.…”

“…We showed students the block 1e that would allow them to create their own obstacle dodger robot. [3][4][5] year old children worked in groups of 5 to 6 children and each group programmed the robot using conditional. Upon showing them the block representing conditional all of them placed the turn arrow command when the block showed an obstacle, and an straight arrow command when the block showed no obstacles.…”

“…Nevertheless, we still are debating what kind of CS concepts should be taught in preschool and elementary school [15]. Some countries such as Estonia and the UK have recently introduced CS in these levels [5], but most others-including ours-are still deliberating when would it be appropriate to introduce CS in schools and what content is most suitable for the general basic education. While research on teaching CS in different educational levels is vast, and colleagues have proposed curricular designs [9,3], comparisons among different age groups performance that inform curriculum selection and scope is not as common [5,11].…”

How Challenging are Bebras Tasks?

“…However, evaluating the difficulty of a task is actually not easy. Thus, after the conclusion of the competition it is advisable to infer the perceived task difficulty starting from the participants' performance (see also [3,13]), in order to tune choices and strategies in the next competitions.…”