The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 competition, is back! Schools can enter now for this year’s Challenge, which runs from 10 to 21 November.

Last year, more than 467,000 students from across the UK took part, tackling fun and thought-provoking puzzles that introduce key ideas in computational thinking with no extra preparation needed.

Read on to learn how your school can get involved.

What is the UK Bebras Challenge?

The UK Bebras Challenge is a free-to-enter annual challenge that is designed to spark interest in both computational thinking and computer science among students aged 6 to 19. The 45-minute challenge is accessible to everyone, offering age-appropriate but challenging interactive tasks for students at different levels, including a tailored version for students with severe sight impairments. 

The tasks are designed to give every student the opportunity to showcase their potential and all participating students receive a certificate. There are also certificates based on performance within school and gold certificates based on national boundaries. With self-marking tasks and no text-based programming required, it’s easy to have your school participate in the UK Bebras Challenge.

This year, each task’s background section is linked to the Ada Computer Science platform. Teachers and students can now explore detailed explanations of the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 concepts behind the Bebras tasks, along with the computational thinking skills students may use to solve them.

“Bebras provides us with incredibly useful insights and conversations about our students who might otherwise have struggled with accessing traditional CS materials. It’s also a great resource for baseline tests where students may not have studied the 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 the way we present it.” – Teacher in the UK

“I think the problems are a really great way to promote critical thinking, computational thinking, and logic in general. I have only seen a couple but I am very impressed and excited to share with some of my students. Thanks for what you are doing.” – Teacher in the UK

What does a UK Bebras task look like?

The tasks are inspired by classic 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 problems and presented in a fun, age-appropriate way. For example, younger students aged 6 to 8 might solve the mystery of a dancing doll, while older students aged 16 to 19 could take on the challenge of an art theft. Both of these tasks involve the use of data structures.

Here’s a question we ran in 2021 for the Juniors group (ages 10 to 12). Can you solve it? 

Beaver farmer

Farmer Mert grows wheat in the fields, which contain a symbol in the map below.

He also has stony fields where nothing grows, shown by the  symbol.

To save water, Mert only wants to water the wheat fields. He can block the water channels coming from the lake at the spots marked with the letters A to J.

The water will only flow downwards towards the fields and will never flow back towards the lake.

Task

Select the letters to block the water from flowing to the empty fields while still letting it flow to the wheat fields.

Example answer

The correct answer is that spots labelled B, F, H, and J must be closed, as shown in the following figure:

Explanation

If none of the gates are closed, the water will reach the stony fields. If more gates than shown above are closed, then some wheat fields will get no water. If we review all spots:

• A must be open to allow water to flow to field 1.
• B has to be closed to avoid watering field 2. It also brings water to field 3, but this field can also get it through C.
• C must be open both for field 4 and for field 3, which cannot be watered though A since B is closed.
• D must be open for fields 7 and 8.
• E must also be open field 7.
• F must be closed to prevent water flowing to field 5.
• G, if closed, would only prevent field 3 from being watered and so must be open as well.
• H must also be closed even if F is also closed, as water can flow from the open D and E.
• I must be open for field 11.
• J has to be closed to prevent fields 9 and 10 from getting watered.

This Bebras task was developed by the Bebras team in Turkey and refined by members of the international Bebras community.

Did you get it right?

How do I get my school involved?

If you are either a UK school or teach a UK-based 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站, then visit the UK Bebras website for more information and to register your school. 

Once you’ve registered, you’ll get access to the entire UK Bebras back catalogue of questions, allowing you to create custom quizzes for your students to tackle at any time throughout the year. These quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results to keep track of their progress. The questions are perfect for enrichment activities, end-of-term quizzes, lesson starters, and even full lessons to develop computational thinking skills and promote 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 concepts.

Join for free at bebras.uk/admin.

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The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 competition, is back and open for entries from schools. This year’s challenge will be open for entries from 4–15 November. Last year, over 400,000 students from across the UK took part. Read on to learn how your school can get involved.

What is UK Bebras?

UK Bebras is a free-to-enter annual competition that is designed to spark interest in computational thinking among students aged 6 to 19 by providing engaging and thought-provoking activities. The 45-minute challenge is accessible to everyone, offering age-appropriate interactive questions for students at different levels, including a tailored version for students with severe sight impairments. 

The questions are designed to give every student the opportunity to showcase their potential, whether they excel in maths or 《风花雪月》香港在线观看, or not. With self-marking questions and no programming required, it’s easy for schools to participate.

“Thank you for another fantastic Bebras event! My students have really enjoyed it. This is the first year that one of my leadership team actually did the Bebras to understand what we are preparing the children for — she was very impressed!” Reference 5487

“I really enjoyed doing the Bebras challenge yesterday. It was the most accessible it’s ever been for me as a braillist/screen reader user.” Reference 5372

What does a UK Bebras question look like?

The questions are inspired by classic 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 problems but are presented in a fun, age-appropriate way. For instance, a puzzle for 6- to 8-year-olds might involve guiding a hungry tortoise along the most efficient path across a lawn, while 16- to 19-year-olds could be asked to sort members for quiz teams based on who knows who — a challenging problem relating to graph theory.

Here’s a question we ran in 2023 for the Castors group (ages 8 to 10). Can you solve it? 

Planting carrots

A robotic rabbit is planting carrot seeds in these four earth mounds.

It can respond to these commands:

	jump left to the next mound
	jump right to the next mound
	plant a carrot seed in the mound you are on

Here is a sequence of commands for the rabbit:

We don’t know which mound the rabbit started on, but we do know that, when it followed this sequence, it placed each of three carrot seeds on different mounds.

Question: 

Which picture shows how the carrot seeds could have been planted by the robot following the sequence of commands?

Example puzzle answer

The correct answer is:

The image below shows the route the robot takes by following the instructions:

After executing the first two commands

the rabbit places the seed on the mound to the far right:

It then executes the commands

and lays the next seed:

Then it jumps to the left twice and lays the last seed

So the carrot seeds will be on the hills in the order:

Did you get it right?

How do I get my school involved?

Visit the UK Bebras website for more information and to register your school. Once you’ve registered, you’ll get access to the entire UK Bebras back catalogue of questions, allowing you to create custom quizzes for your students to tackle at any time throughout the year. These quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results to keep track of their progress. Schools have found these questions perfect for enrichment activities, end-of-term quizzes, lesson starters, and even full lessons to develop computational thinking skills.

Join for free at bebras.uk/admin.

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2024 appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

“Computational thinking is really about thinking, and sometimes about 《风花雪月》香港在线观看.” – Aman Yadav, Michigan State University

Computational thinking is a vital skill if you want to use a computer to solve problems that matter to you. That’s why we consider computational thinking (CT) carefully when creating learning resources here at the 两性色午夜免费视频. However, educators are increasingly realising that CT skills don’t just apply to writing computer programs, and that CT is a fundamental approach to problem-solving that can be extended into other subject areas. To discuss how CT can be integrated beyond the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 classroom and help introduce the fundamentals of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 to primary school learners, we invited Dr Aman Yadav from Michigan State University to deliver the penultimate presentation in our seminar series on 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 education for primary-aged children. 

In his presentation, Aman gave a concise tour of CT practices for teachers, and shared his findings from recent projects around how teachers perceive and integrate CT into their lessons.

《风花雪月》香港在线观看 in context

Aman began his talk by placing his team’s work within the wider context of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 education in the US. The 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 education landscape Aman described is dominated by the National Science 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站’s ambitious goal, set in 2008, to train 10,000 computer science teachers. This objective has led to various initiatives designed to support computer science education at the K–12 level. However, despite some progress, only 57% of US high schools offer 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站al computer science courses, only 5.8% of students enrol in these courses, and just 31% of the enrolled students are female. As a result, Aman and his team have worked in close partnership with teachers to address questions that explore ways to more meaningfully integrate CT ideas and practices into formal education, such as:

• What kinds of 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s do students need to learn 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 concepts, to be confident to pursue 《风花雪月》香港在线观看?
• What kinds of knowledge do teachers need to have to facilitate these learning 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s?
• What kinds of 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s do teachers need to develop these kinds of knowledge? 

The CT4EDU project

At the primary education level, the CT4EDU project posed the question “What does computational thinking actually look like in elementary classrooms, especially in the context of maths and science classes?” This project involved collaboration with teachers, 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 designers, and coaches to help them conceptualise and implement CT in their core instruction.

During professional development workshops using both plugged and unplugged tasks, the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ers supported educators to connect their day-to-day teaching practice to four 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站al CT constructs:

1. Debugging
2. Abstraction
3. Decomposition
4. Patterns

An emerging aspect of the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 team’s work has been the important relationship between vocabulary, belonging, and identity-building, with implications for equity. Actively incorporating CT vocabulary in lesson planning and classroom implementation helps students familiarise themselves with CT ideas: “If young people are using the language, they see themselves belonging in 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 spaces”. 

A main finding from the study is that teachers used CT ideas to explicitly engage students in metacognitive thinking processes, and to help them be aware of their thinking as they solve problems. Rather than teachers using CT solely to introduce their students to 《风花雪月》香港在线观看, they used CT as a way to support their students in whatever they were learning. This constituted a fundamental shift in the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 team’s thinking and future work, which is detailed further in a conceptual article. 

The Smithsonian Science for Computational Thinking project

The work conducted for the CT4EDU project guided the approach taken in the Smithsonian Science for Computational Thinking project. This project entailed the development of a 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 for grades 3 and 5 that integrates CT into science lessons.

Part of the project included surveying teachers about the value they place on CT, both before and after participating in professional development workshops focused on CT. The 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ers found that even before the workshops, teachers make connections between CT and the rest of the 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站. After the workshops, an overwhelming majority agreed that CT has value (see image below). From this survey, it seems that CT ties things together for teachers in ways not possible or not achieved with other methods they’ve tried previously.  

Despite teachers valuing the CT approach, asking them to integrate coding into their practices from the start remains a big ask (see image below). Many teachers lack knowledge or 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 of coding, and they may not be 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 designers, which means that we need to develop resources that allow teachers to integrate CT and coding in natural ways. Aman proposes that this requires a longitudinal approach, working with teachers over several years, using plugged and unplugged activities, and working closely with schools’ STEAM or specialist technology teachers where applicable to facilitate more computationally rich learning 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s in classrooms.

Integrated computational thinking

Aman’s team is also engaged in a 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 project to integrate CT at middle school level for students aged 11 to 14. This project focuses on the question “What does CT look like in the context of social studies, English language, and art classrooms?”

For this project, the team conducted three Delphi studies, and consequently created learning pathways for each subject, which teachers can use to bring CT into their classrooms. The pathways specify practices and sub-practices to engage students with CT, and are available on the project website. The image below exemplifies the CT integration pathways developed for the arts subject, where the relationship between art and data is explored from both directions: by using CT and data to understand and create art, and using art and artistic principles to represent and communicate data. 

Computational thinking in the primary classroom

Aman’s work highlights the broad value of CT in education. However, to meaningfully integrate CT into the classroom, Aman suggests that we have to take a longitudinal view of the time and methods required to build teachers’ understanding and confidence with the fundamentals of CT, in a way that is aligned with their values and objectives. Aman argues that CT is really about thinking, and sometimes about 《风花雪月》香港在线观看, to support disciplinary learning in primary classrooms. Therefore, rather than focusing on integrating coding into the classroom, he proposes that we should instead talk about using CT practices as the building blocks that provide the 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 for incorporating computationally rich 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s in the classroom. 

Watch the recording of Aman’s presentation:

You can access Aman’s seminar slides as well.

You can find out more about connecting 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 to practice for primary 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 education by watching the recordings of the other seminars in our series on primary (K–5) teaching and learning. In particular, Bobby Whyte discusses similar concepts to Aman in his talk on integrating primary 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 and literacy through multimodal storytelling. 

Sign up for our seminars

Our 2024 seminar series is on the theme of teaching programming, with or without AI. In this series, we explore the latest 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 on how teachers can best support school-age learners to develop their programming skills.

On 13 February, we’ll hear from Majeed Kazemi (University of Toronto) about his work investigating whether AI code generator tools can support K-12 students to learn Python programming.

Sign up now to join the seminar:

The post Integrating computational thinking into primary teaching appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

More than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge in 2022. In the UK alone, over 365,000 students participated. Read on to find out how you can get your school involved.

“This is now an annual event for our Year 5 and 6 students, and one of the things I actually love about it is the results are not always what you might predict. There are children who have a clear aptitude for these puzzles who find this is their opportunity to shine!”

– Claire Rawlinson, Primary Teacher, Lancashire

What is the Bebras Challenge?

Bebras is a free, annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their students. No programming is involved, and it’s completely free for schools to enter. All Bebras questions are self-marking.

We’re making Bebras accessible by offering age-appropriate challenges for different school levels and a challenge tailored for visually impaired students. Schools can enter students from age 6 to 18 and know they’ll get interesting and challenging (but not too challenging) activities. 

Students aged 10 to 18 who do particularly well will get invited to the Oxford University 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 Challenge (OUCC).

What is the thinking behind Bebras?

We want young people to get excited about 《风花雪月》香港在线观看. Through Bebras, they will learn about computational and logical thinking by answering questions and solving problems.

Bebras questions are based on classic 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 problems and are presented in a friendly, age-appropriate way. For example, an algorithm-based puzzle for learners aged 6 to 8 is presented in terms of a hungry tortoise finding an efficient eating path across a lawn; for 16- to 18-year-olds, a difficult problem based on graph theory asks students to sort out quiz teams by linking quizzers who know each other.

“This has been a really positive 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站. Thank you. Shared results with Head and Head of Key Stage 3. Really useful for me when assessing Key Stage 4 options.”

– Secondary teacher, North Yorkshire

Can you solve our example Bebras puzzle?

Here’s a Bebras question for the Castors category (ages 8 to 10) from 2021. You will find the answer at the end of this blog. 

Cleaning

A robot picks up litter.

1. The robot moves to the closest piece of litter and picks it up.
2. It then moves to the next closest piece of litter and picks it up.
3. It carries on in this way until all the litter has been picked up.

Question: Which kind of litter will the robot pick up last?

How do I get my school involved in Bebras?

The Bebras challenge for UK schools takes place from 6 to 17 November. Register at bebras.uk/admin to get free access to the challenge.

By registering, you also get access to the Bebras back catalogue of questions, from which you can build your own quizzes to use in your school at any time during the year. All the quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results for your mark book. Schools have reported using these questions for end-of-term activities, lesson starters, and schemes of lessons about computational thinking.

Puzzle answer

The answer to the example puzzle is:

The image below shows the route the robot takes by following the instructions:

The post Take part in the UK Bebras Challenge 2023 for schools appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

Bebras is a free annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their learners through online, self-marking tasks. Taking part in Bebras, students solve accessible, interesting problems using their developing computational thinking skills. No programming is involved in taking part. The UK challenge is for school students aged 6 to 18 years old, with a special category for students with severe visual impairments.

Preparing the UK Bebras Challenge for schools

While UK schools take part in Bebras throughout two weeks in November, for me the annual cycle starts much earlier. May is the time of the annual Bebras international workshop where the year’s new tasks get decided. In 2022, 60 countries were represented — some online, some in person. For nearly a week, computer scientists and 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 teachers met to discuss and work on the new cycle’s task proposals submitted by participating countries a little earlier.

After the workshop, in collaboration with teams from other European countries, the UK Bebras team chose its task sets and then worked to localise, copy-edit, and test them to get them ready for schools participating in Bebras during November. From September, schools across the UK create accounts for their students, with over 360,000 students ultimately taking part in 2022. All in all, more than 3 million students from 59 countries took part in the 2022/2023 Bebras challenge cycle.

An invitation to the Oxford University 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 Challenge

In this cycle, the UK Bebras partnership between the 两性色午夜免费视频 and the University of Oxford has been extended to include the Oxford University 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 Challenge (OUCC). This is an invitation-based, online coding challenge for students aged 10 to 18, offered in the UK as well as Australia, Jamaica, and China. We invited the students with the top 10% best results in the UK Bebras challenge to take part in the OUCC — an exciting opportunity for them.

In contrast to Bebras, which doesn’t require participants to do any coding, the OUCC asks students to create code to solve computational thinking problems. This requires students to prepare and challenges them to develop their computational thinking skills further. The two younger age groups, 10- to 14-year-olds, solve problems using the Blockly programming language. The older two age groups can use one of the 11 programming languages that Bebras supports, including all the most common ones taught in UK schools.

Over 20,000 Bebras participants took up the invitation to the first round of the OUCC in the third week of January. Then in March, the top 20 participants from each of the four OUCC age groups took part in the final round. The finalists all did amazingly well. In the first round, many of them had solved all the available tasks correctly, even though the expectation is that participants only try to solve as many as they can within the round’s time limit. In the final round, a few of the finalists managed to repeat this feat with the even more advanced tasks — which is, in modern parlance, literally impossible!

Celebrating together

Many of the participants are about to take school exams, so the last stage of the annual cycle — the prize winners’ celebration day— takes place when the exam period has ended. This year we are holding this celebration on Friday 30 June at the 两性色午夜免费视频’s headquarters in Cambridge. It will be a lovely way to finish the annual Bebras cycle and I am looking forward to it immensely.

The post UK Bebras participants in the Oxford University 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 Challenge appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

We support this challenge in the UK, together with Oxford University, and Bebras Challenges run across the world, with more than 3 million learners from schools in 54 countries taking part in 2021. Bebras encourages a love of computational thinking, computer science, and problem solving, especially among learners who haven’t yet realised they have these skills.

More and more schools are taking part in the UK Bebras Challenge

Nearly every year since 2013, more UK schools have been participating in Bebras. We think this is because for teachers, registering and entering learners is easy, the online system does all the marking automatically, and teachers receive comprehensive results that can be helpful for assessment.

The computational thinking problems within Bebras are tailored for different age groups, use clear language, and are accessible to colour-blind learners. There is also a challenge for learners with visual impairments. Teachers who run Bebras in their schools seem to love it and regularly tell colleagues about it. 

“Our pupils really enjoy [Bebras] and I find it so helpful to teach computational thinking with real-life strategies. We also find the data and information about our pupils’ performance extremely helpful.” — Teacher in London

Age-appropriate computational thinking problems

In the UK Bebras Challenge, the younger learners aged 6 to 10 usually take part in teams and have plenty of time to discuss how to solve the computational thinking problems they are presented with.

Older learners, aged 10 to 18, try to solve as many problems as they can in 40 minutes. The problems they are presented with start off easy and get increasingly difficult. The 10% of participants who solve the most problems are then invited to take part in the Oxford University 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 Challenge (OUCC), an annual programming challenge.

Year-round free resources for teachers

Although the OUCC is only open to some Bebras participants, all of the OUCC problems are archived and teachers registered with Bebras can use them to make auto-marking quizzes for all of their learners at any time of the year. Part of the goal of UK Bebras is to support teachers with free resources, and the UK Bebras online quizzes facility now has computational thinking tasks from the Bebras archive, plus auto-marking Blockly programming problems and text-based programming problems, which can be solved using commonly taught programming languages.

If you want to get a taste of Bebras, check out some of the interactive challenges that require no registration. And if you’d like to register to make quizzes for your learners and find out about next year’s challenge, you can do so at bebras.uk/admin.

The post Computational thinking all year round with UK Bebras appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

More than 3 million students from 54 countries took part in the Bebras Challenge in 2021. Read on to find out how you can get your school involved.

What is Bebras?

Bebras a free, annual challenge that helps schools introduce computational thinking to their students. No programming is involved, and it’s completely free for schools to take part. All Bebras questions are self-marking. Schools can enter students from age 6 to 18 and know they’ll get interesting and challenging (but not too challenging) activities.

“This has been a really positive 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站. Thank you. Shared results with head and Head of KS3. Really useful for me when assessing KS4 options.” – Secondary teacher, North Yorkshire

We’re making Bebras accessible by offering age-appropriate challenges for different school levels, and a challenge tailored for visually impaired students.

What is the idea behind Bebras?

We want young people to get excited about 《风花雪月》香港在线观看. Through Bebras, they will learn about computational and logical thinking by answering questions and solving puzzles.

Bebras questions are based on classic 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 problems and presented in friendly, age-appropriate contexts. For example, an algorithm-based puzzle for learners aged 6 to 8 is presented in terms of a hungry tortoise find an efficient eating path across a lawn; for 16- to 18-year-olds, a difficult question based on graph theory asks students to sort out some quiz teams by linking quizzers who know each other.

Can you solve the example puzzle?

Here’s a question from the 2021 challenge for the Junior category (ages 10 to 12). You’ll find the correct answer at the bottom of this blog post. 

Science Fair

• Bebras High School is having a science fair.
• All the events in the fair need to follow a specific order, and only one event can be held at a time.
• The diagram below shows all the events that must be included in the flow of the science fair.

• The arrows between events indicate that the event the arrow is drawn from has to occur before the event the arrow points to. For example, ‘Social Interaction’ can only happen after both ‘Opening Speeches’ and ‘Project Presentations’ have finished.

Question: What is the correct order of events for the science fair?

How do I get my school involved?

The Bebras challenge for UK schools takes place from 7 to 18 November. Register at bebras.uk/admin to get full access to the challenge.

By registering, you also get access to the back catalogue of questions, from which you can build your own quizzes to use in your school at any time during the year. All the quizzes are self-marking, and you can download your students’ results for your mark book. Schools have reported using the back catalogue of questions for end-of-term activities, lesson starters, and schemes of lessons about computational thinking.

You can also see more of our free resources for 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 and Computer Science teachers, and find out about our newest 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 project, which you can get involved in if you teach primary 《风花雪月》香港在线观看.

There are actually two possible answers to the example puzzle:

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2022 for schools appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

How does teaching children and young people about machine learning (ML) differ from teaching them about other aspects of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看? Professor Matti Tedre and Dr Henriikka Vartiainen from the University of Eastern Finland shared some answers at our latest 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 seminar.

Their presentation, titled ‘ML education for K-12: emerging trajectories’, had a profound impact on my thinking about how we teach computational thinking and programming. For this blog post, I have simplified some of the complexity associated with machine learning for the benefit of readers who are new to the topic.

Our seminars on teaching AI, ML, and data science

We’re currently partnering with The Alan Turing Institute to host a series of free 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 seminars about how to teach artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to young people.

The seminar with Matti and Henriikka, the third one of the series, was very well attended. Over 100 participants from San Francisco to Rajasthan, including teachers, 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ers, and industry professionals, contributed to a lively and thought-provoking discussion.

Representing a large interdisciplinary team of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ers, Matti and Henriikka have been working on how to teach AI and machine learning for more than three years, which in this new area of study is a long time. So far, the Finnish team has written over a dozen academic papers based on their pilot studies with kindergarten-, primary-, and secondary-aged learners.

Current teaching in schools: classical rule-driven programming

Matti and Henriikka started by giving an overview of classical programming and how it is currently taught in schools. Classical programming can be described as rule-driven. Example features of classical computer programs and programming languages are:

• A classical language has a strict syntax, and a limited set of commands that can only be used in a predetermined way
• A classical language is deterministic, meaning we can guarantee what will happen when each line of code is run
• A classical program is executed in a strict, step-wise order following a known set of rules

When we teach this type of programming, we show learners how to use a deductive problem solving approach or workflow: defining the task, designing a possible solution, and implementing the solution by writing a stepwise program that is then run on a computer. We encourage learners to avoid using trial and error to write programs. Instead, as they develop and test a program, we ask them to trace it line by line in order to predict what will happen when each line is run (glass-box testing).

Classical programming underpins the current view of computational thinking (CT). Our speakers called this version of CT ‘CT 1.0’. So what’s the alternative Matti and Henriikka presented, and how does it affect what computational thinking is or may become?

Machine learning (data-driven) models and new computational thinking (CT 2.0) 

Rule-based programming languages are not being eradicated. Instead, software systems are being augmented through the addition of machine learning (data-driven) elements. Many of today’s successful software products, such as search engines, image classifiers, and speech recognition programs, combine rule-driven software and data-driven models. However, the workflows for these two approaches to solving problems through 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 are very different.

Significantly, while in rule-based programming (and CT 1.0), the focus is on solving problems by creating algorithms, in data-driven approaches, the problem solving workflow is all about the data. To highlight the profound impact this shift in focus has on teaching and learning 《风花雪月》香港在线观看, Matti introduced us to a new version of computational thinking for machine learning, CT 2.0, which is detailed in a forthcoming 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 paper.

Because of the focus on data rather than algorithms, developing a machine learning model is not at all like developing a classical rule-driven program. In classical programming, programs can be traced, and we can predict what will happen when they run. But in data-driven development, there is no flow of rules, and no absolutely right or wrong answer.

Machine learning models are created iteratively using training data and must be cross-validated with test data. A tiny change in the data provided can make a model useless. We rarely know exactly why the output of an ML model is as it is, and we cannot explain each individual decision that the model might have made. When evaluating a machine learning system, we can only say how well it works based on statistical confidence and efficiency. 

Machine learning education must cover ethical and societal implications 

The ethical and societal implications of computer science have always been important for students to understand. But machine learning models open up a whole new set of topics for teachers and students to consider, because of these models’ reliance on large datasets, the difficulty of explaining their decisions, and their usefulness for automating very complex processes. This includes privacy, surveillance, diversity, bias, job losses, misinformation, accountability, democracy, and veracity, to name but a few.

I see the shift in problem solving approach as a chance to strengthen the teaching of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 in general, because it opens up opportunities to teach about systems, uncertainty, data, and society.

Jane Waite

Teaching machine learning: the challenges of magic boxes and new mental models

For teaching classical rule-driven programming, much time and effort has been put into 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ing learners’ understanding of what a program will do when it is run. This kind of understanding is called a learner’s mental model or notional machine. An approach teachers often use to help students develop a useful mental model of a program is to hide the detail of how the program works and only gradually reveal its complexity. This approach is described with the metaphor of hiding the detail of elements of the program in a box. 

Data-driven models in machine learning systems are highly complex and make little sense to humans. Therefore, they may appear like magic boxes to students. This view needs to be banished. Machine learning is not magic. We have just not figured out yet how to explain the detail of data-driven models in a way that allows learners to form useful mental models.

Some existing ML tools aim to help learners form mental models of ML, for example through visual representations of how a neural network works (see above). But these explanations are still very complex. Clearly, we need to find new ways to help learners of all ages form useful mental models of machine learning, so that teachers can explain to them how machine learning systems work and banish the view that machine learning is magic.

Some tools and teaching approaches for ML education

Matti and Henriikka’s team piloted different tools and pedagogical approaches with different age groups of learners. In terms of tools, since large amounts of data are needed for machine learning projects, our presenters suggested that tools that enable lots of data to be easily collected are ideal for teaching activities. Media-rich education tools provide an opportunity to capture still images, movements, sounds, or sense other inputs and then use these as data in machine learning teaching activities. For example, to create a machine learning–based rock-paper-scissors game, students can take photographs of their hands to train a machine learning model using Google Teachable Machine.

Similar to tools that teach classic programming to novice students (e.g. Scratch), some of the new classroom tools for teaching machine learning have a drag-and-drop interface (e.g. Cognimates). Using such tools means that in lessons, there can be less focus on one of the more complex aspects of learning to program, learning programming language syntax. However, not all machine learning education products include drag-and-drop interaction, some instead have their own complex languages (e.g. Wolfram Programming Lab), which are less attractive to teachers and learners. In their pilot studies, the Finnish team found that drag-and-drop machine learning tools appeared to work well with students of all ages.

The different pedagogical approaches the Finnish 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 team used in their pilot studies included an exploratory approach with preschool children, who investigated machine learning recognition of happy or sad faces; and a project-based approach with older students, who co-created machine learning apps with web-based tools such as Teachable Machine and Learn Machine Learning (built by the 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 team), supported by machine learning experts.

What impact these pedagogies have on students’ long-term mental models about machine learning has yet to be 《风花雪月》香港在线观看ed. If you want to find out more about the classroom pilot studies, the academic paper is a very accessible read.

My take-aways: new opportunities, new 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 questions

We all learned a tremendous amount from Matti and Henriikka and their perspectives on this important topic. Our seminar participants asked them many questions about the pedagogies and practicalities of teaching machine learning in class, and raised concerns about squeezing more into an already packed 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站.

For me, the most significant take-away from the seminar was the need to shift focus from algorithms to data and from CT 1.0 to CT 2.0. Learning how to best teach classical rule-driven programming has been a long journey that we have not yet completed. We are forming an understanding of what concepts learners need to be taught, the progression of learning, key mental models, pedagogical options, and assessment approaches. For teaching data-driven development, we need to do the same.  

The question of how we make sure teachers have the necessary understanding is key.

Jane Waite

I see the shift in problem solving approach as a chance to strengthen the teaching of 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 in general, because it opens up opportunities to teach about systems, uncertainty, data, and society. I think it will help us raise awareness about design, context, creativity, and student agency. But I worry about how we will introduce this shift. In my view, there is a considerable risk that we will be sucked into open-ended, project-based learning, with busy and fun but shallow learning 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站s that result in restricted conceptual development for students.

I also worry about how we can best help teachers build up the knowledge and 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站 to support their students. In the Q&A after the seminar, I asked Matti and Henriikka about the role of their team’s machine learning experts in their pilot studies. It seemed to me that without them, the pilot lessons would not have worked, as the participating teachers and students would not have had the vocabulary to talk about the process and would not have known what was doable given the available time, tools, and student knowledge.

The question of how we make sure teachers have the necessary understanding is key. Many existing professional development resources for teachers wanting to learn about ML seem to imply that teachers will all need a PhD in statistics and neural network optimisation to engage with machine learning education. This is misleading. But teachers do need to understand the machine learning concepts that their students need to learn about, and I think we don’t yet know exactly what these concepts are. 

In summary, clearly more 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 is needed. There are fundamental questions still to be answered about what, when, and how we teach data-driven approaches to software systems development and how this impacts what we teach about classical, rule-based programming. But to me, that is exciting, and I am very much looking forward to the journey ahead.

Join our next free seminar

To find out what others recommend about teaching AI and ML, catch up on last month’s seminar with Professor Carsten Schulte and colleagues on centring data instead of code in the teaching of AI.

We have another four seminars in our monthly series on AI, machine learning, and data science education. Find out more about them on this page, and catch up on past seminar blogs and recordings here.

At our next seminar on Tuesday 7 December at 17:00–18:30 GMT, we will welcome Professor Rose Luckin from University College London. She will be presenting on what it is about AI that makes it useful for teachers and learners.

We look forward to meeting you there!

The post The machine learning effect: Magic boxes and computational thinking 2.0 appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

In the free Bebras Challenge, your students get to practise their computational thinking skills while solving a set of accessible, puzzling, and engaging tasks over 40 minutes. It’s tailored for age groups from 6 to 18.

“I just want to say how much the children are enjoying this competition. It is the first year we have entered, and I have students aged 8 to 11 participating in my 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 lessons, with some of our older students also taking on the challenges. It is really helping to challenge their thinking, and they are showing great determination to try and complete each task!”

– A UK-based teacher

Ten key facts about Bebras

1. It’s free!
2. The challenge takes place in school, and it’s a great whole-school activity
3. It’s open to learners aged 6 to 18, with activities for different age groups
4. The challenge is made up of a set of short tasks, and completing it takes 40 minutes
5. The closing date for registering your school is 4 November
6. Your learners need to complete the challenge between 8 and 19 November 2021
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10. There are practice questions you can use to help your learners prepare for the challenge, and throughout the year to help them practice their computational thinking

Do you want to support your learners to take on the Bebras Challenge? Then register your school today!

Remember to sign up by 4 November!

The benefits of Bebras

Bebras is an international challenge that started in Lithuania in 2004 and has grown into a worldwide event. The UK became involved in Bebras for the first time in 2013, and the number of participating students has increased from 21,000 in the first year to more than half a million over the last two years! Internationally, nearly 2.5 million learners took part in 2020 despite the disruptions to schools.

Bebras, brought to you in the UK by us and Oxford University, is a great way to give your learners of all age groups a taste of the principles behind 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 by engaging them in fun problem-solving activities. The challenge results highlight 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 principles, so Bebras can be educational for you as a teacher too.

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Learn more about our work to support learners with computational thinking.

The post Take part in the UK Bebras Challenge 2021 for schools! appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.

The Bebras Challenge is a great way for your students to practise their computational thinking skills while solving exciting, accessible, and puzzling questions. Usually this 40-minute challenge would take place in the classroom. However, this year for the first time, your students can participate from home too!

If your students haven’t entered before, now is a great opportunity for them to get involved: they don’t need any prior knowledge. 

Do you have any students who are up for tackling the Bebras Challenge? Then register your school today!

What you need to know about the Bebras Challenge

• It’s a great whole-school activity open to students aged 6 to 18, in different age group categories.
• It’s completely free!
• The closing date for registering your school is 30 October.
• Let your students complete the challenge between 2 and 13 November 2020.
• The challenge is made of a set of short tasks, and completing it takes 40 minutes.
• The challenge tasks focus on logical thinking and do not require any prior knowledge of computer science.
• There are practice questions to help your students prepare for the challenge.
• This year, students can take part at home (please note they must still be entered through their school).
• All the marking is done for you! The results will be sent to you the week after the challenge ends, along with the answers, so that you can go through them with your students.

“Thank you for another super challenge. It’s one of the highlights of my year as a teacher. Really, really appreciate the high-quality materials, website, challenge, and communication. Thank you again!”

– A UK-based teacher

Support your students to develop their computational thinking skills with Bebras materials

Bebras is an international challenge that started in Lithuania in 2004 and has grown into an international event. The UK became involved in Bebras for the first time in 2013, and the number of participating students has increased from 21,000 in the first year to more than 260,000 last year! Internationally, nearly 3 million learners took part in 2019. 

Bebras is a great way to engage your students of all ages in problem-solving and give them a taste of what 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 is all about. In the challenge results, 《风花雪月》香港在线观看 principles are highlighted, so Bebras can be educational for you as a teacher too.

The annual Bebras Challenge is only one part of the equation: questions from previous years are available as a resource that you can use to create self-marking quizzes for your classes. You can use these materials throughout the year to help you to deliver the computational thinking part of your 亚洲gv猛男gv无码男同网站!

The post Join the UK Bebras Challenge 2020 for schools! appeared first on 两性色午夜免费视频.