Abstract
A Bebras short task, a tasklet, is designed to provide a source for exploring a computational thinking concept: at the end of the contest it could be used as a starting point to delve deeper into a computing topic. In this paper we report an experience which aims at taking full advantage of the potential of Bebras tasklets. A math teacher asked her pupils to act as Bebras “trainers” for younger mates. The pupils, in pairs, were assigned to design and prepare a tangible game inspired by a Bebras tasklet, devised for the younger pupils to practice. They also had to explain the game to the younger pupils, make them play and support them in solving it. In carrying out this assignment the pupils acting as trainers had to deeply explore the Bebras tasklet and face its computational thinking challenge, and also practiced soft skills as collaborating with peers towards a common goal, adapting language and communicative style to engage with younger mates, devising and designing a tangible object, and planning its creation. The experience proved that using Bebras tasklets as the social and cultural context for situated learning of computational thinking competencies is indeed quite productive.
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Notes
- 1.
http://bebras.org/ ‘Bebras’ is the Lithuanian word for ‘beaver’: some countries translate it, and others use it as a brand name.
- 2.
We report in bracket the international Bebras id code, although the tasklets were sometimes modified to exploit the interactivity potential of the Italian Bebras Platform and to take into account that the Italian contest is team based (whereas it is individual in most of the countries). The screenshots of the actual tasklets (translated to English for this paper) are given in Appendix A.
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A Tasklets screenshots with games
A Tasklets screenshots with games
Birthday party
Drawing game
Balls
Waiter
Board jumps
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Bellettini, C., Lonati, V., Monga, M., Morpurgo, A., Palazzolo, M. (2019). Situated Learning with Bebras Tasklets. In: Pozdniakov, S., Dagienė, V. (eds) Informatics in Schools. New Ideas in School Informatics. ISSEP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11913. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33759-9_18
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