Over the last fortnight Birkdale students who study Computer Science have been taking part in the annual Bebras Challenge. One of our S1 students who speaks Lithuanian was able to identify that Bebras means ‘beaver’ in that language – and the participants did find themselves ‘beavering away’ on an assortment of easy, medium and hard questions during a 40 minute online test. The questions ranged from logic puzzles and programming tasks to constraint-based optimisation scenarios and sorting algorithms.

Students had practice sessions in class and some extra exposure to the style of questions used for homework. Hopefully this will have prepared them well for the actual competition and we are hoping to match previous success stories and bag some more perfect scores. Results will be available in a couple of weeks and the students who performed well will be invited to take part in the Oxford University Computing Challenge in early January 2024.