Getting Inspired by Bebras Tasks. How Italian Teachers Elaborate on Computing Topics

The Bebras challenge offers pupils and teachers an engaging opportunity to discover informatics, by solving small tasks that aim at promoting computational thinking. Explanations and comments that reveal the computing concepts underlying the tasks are published after the contest, and teachers are encouraged to use this material in their school practice. In this paper we present an exploratory study aimed at investigating how teachers can make use of Bebras material; in particular our interest is understanding whether teachers are able to identify, comprehend, and apply the computing concepts implied by Bebras tasks, and how they can integrate them into their teaching practice. We qualitatively analyzed teaching projects developed by Italian teachers during a workshop on computing education and based on Bebras tasks; the analysis shows that teachers are in general able to build upon the tasks soundly, but it also raises some critical issues.