Graph Tasks in Bebras Contest
Lucia Budinská, Karolína Miková · 2017
Bebras contest has been part of Slovak informatics in schools for 10 years, making contestants familiar with information technologies, computer science concepts and improving their digital skills and computational thinking. In this article we take a look at task group which connects computer science concepts with computational thinking - graph tasks (for example trees, graphs, square grids, graph algorithms...). We focused on the three lowest categories of the Slovak contest, which include pupils of the whole primary school (aged 8 to 15) and analysed the tasks of the last four years. We used both qualitative and quantitative data analysis research methods. Task were divided into subcategories which were further analysed, focusing on identification of the specifics of the tasks in which there were significant differences between boys and girls. Using comparative analysis, it was found that boys are better in tasks with simple (relatively abstract) representation of the structure which is described by a larger amount of text, but the main point of the task is to identify the problem and create or uncover a strategy for finding a solution. Girls' performance is better in tasks that have less text, relatively more complicated representation of the structure and are focused on simple operations at graphs or reading them.