Informatics in Education

This study explores the application of large language models (LLMs) to create computational thinking tasks for the Bebras International Challenge through a single-case study approach. Using exemplar-based prompting with seven authentic Bebras tasks from the 2024 cycle as contextual input, a task was developed that was subsequently accepted for inclusion in the 2025 international Bebras challenge. Comparison with the exemplar tasks confirmed that the generated content drew from multiple sources rather than replicating any single task, combining grid-based constraint satisfaction, rule-based filtering, and logical deduction into a novel navigation puzzle with engaging narrative context. International expert reviewers evaluated the task using established Bebras quality criteria, confirming successful alignment with core pedagogical requirements including age-appropriateness, clarity, and cultural neutrality. However, two significant gaps emerged in the broader authoring workflow: accessibility compliance in the researcher-authored visual components and technical inaccuracies in the LLM-generated informatics framing. Following collaborative revision by international editors that addressed these concerns while preserving the LLM’s creative contributions, the task achieved acceptance for international use. The findings reveal a collaborative pipeline comprising contextual preparation, LLM-guided generation, human technical implementation, expert community review, and collaborative revision. Results from this case suggest that LLMs can efficiently generate educationally sound creative foundations while requiring integrated human expertise to meet specialised standards and ensure inclusive design, with the task’s acceptance providing encouraging evidence for the viability of this collaborative approach.

Research on collaborative learning of computer science has been conducted primarily in programming. This paper extends this area by including short tasks (such as those used in contests like the Bebras Challenge) that cover many other computer science topics. The aim of this research is to explore how problem-solving in pairs differs from individual approaches when tackling contest tasks.

Computing as a discipline has common roots with mathematics and written languages, and computing as a way of thinking and handling has been integral to human culture since ever. This is not only a reasonable argument for convincing society to consider informatics as one of the very fundamental pillars of education, but it also puts the potential contributions of teaching informatics in schools into the correct perspective in the context of science and humanities. Many European countries are switching from teaching information technologies to informatics education during the current second decade of this century. Informatics curriculum is becoming a central part of school education. We explain and design a way of developing informatics curriculum that offer the critical competences new generations need to survive and thrive in todays’ knowledge society and will allow them to contribute to the future development of society. These competences also strongly support the development of their intellectual potential and creativity. Our design of informatics curriculum takes into account the interaction with other scientific disciplines as well with the subject didactics, pedagogy and psychology. The starting point is merging constructionism and critical thinking. Constructionism with its “learning by doing” and “learning by getting things to work” enables designing a teaching process in which students acquire knowledge by creating products, analysing the properties and the functionality of their own products, and finally derive motivation to improve these products. Critical thinking asks us not to teach products of science and technology and their application, but to teach the creative process of their development. To implement this approach, we use the historical method allowing the students to learn by productive failures in the process of searching for a solution. To organize the process of learning and make the different steps available to the appropriate age groups we take into account the cognitive dimensions of the revised taxonomy of Bloom. To illustrate how the combination of all these concepts works we present a detailed curriculum for algorithm design, programming, robotics, and communication in networks.

Although there is no universal agreement that students should learn programming, many countries have reached a consensus on the need to expose K-12 students to Computational Thinking (CT). When, what and how to teach CT in schools are open questions and we attempt to address them by examining how well students around the world solved problems in recent Bebras challenges. We collected and analyzed performance data on Bebras tasks from 115,400 students in grades 3-12 in seven countries. Our study provides further insight into a range of questions addressed in smaller-scale inquiries, in particular about the possible impact of schools systems and gender on students' success rate.

There are many important issues in informatics and many agree that algorithms and programming are most important issues that need to be included in informatics education (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012). In this paper, we propose how some of these issues can be easily taught using the notion of a formal system which consists of axioms and inference rules by which theorems can be proved. As is argued in (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012), we can introduce important topics in informatics using puzzle-like examples and students do not need to have prerequisites for learning. The materials presented in this paper have been used in a college-level elective class titled Hypertext and Computability in our university since the fall semester of 2008 and we believe that the contents proposed in this paper can be easily used to teach beginner students without technical backgrounds.