Bobřík informatiky

Informatická soutěž pro žáky základních a středních škol

Beaver of Informatics

Welcome to the Czech website of the contest "Bobřík informatiky".

The others pages on the web are unfortunately available only in Czech language. You can try to use automatic translation:

The Beaver of Informatics is a contest organized for primary, secondary and high school students. The contest offers the possibility to compete and to popularise informatics at school and also among students – fans of computing. The main goal of the contest is to develop computational thinking and to show students and their teachers the whole rank of informatics which teaching is often reduced to digital literacy training. Another aim is to show them which knowledge and skills are required from IT specialists and also turn attention to the grounfs and principles of informatics as a science so that schools would be able to form students prepared to IT university studies having an undistorted idea of „computer science studies“.

The contest is a member of a cluster of national contests BEBRAS of the same aim and similar organization. More than 60 countries organized the contest last year. The international web for the whole cluster is www.bebras.org. All these countries use common methodological centre that set up some non-committal rules and recommend a set of problems. Contest tasks were taken partly from international database and partly from own resources. We prepare about 80 new tasks every year.

In the Czech contest, students fill in an online test on a web browser. Test duration is 40 minutes, the test contains 12 tasks. Some of them are multiple-choice with 4 answers to choose, some are interactive and can be solved by manipulation with object by mouse or creating a program from blocks. Participants are split into age categories (or school grade categories): Mini (about 10 - 11 years old pupils), Benjamin (about 12 – 13 years old), Kadet (14 – 15 years old), Junior (16-17 years old) and Senior (18-19 years old). Since 2015, we organize second round of the contest for best contestants in category Seniori  which 30 best participants from national round in each of 14 region take part.

The national contest is held every November, each category an extra day. In 2021, the 14-th national contest was held. Number of participants increases during last years:

year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022  2023
participants 4 048 10 351 14 867 19 280 27 550 34 454 44 083 52 597 71 792 74 518 79 988 90 976 61 788 109 442 183 564 216 803

Ratio of girl participants is about 48 % in last years (at primary and lower-secondary schools 49 %).

The tasks come from 5 areas: 

  • Algorithms and Programming (Algorithm, program, programming language, variables, loop, function, parameters, recursion, encapsulation, inheritance, objects, optimization, searching, sorting, computational complexity, operations AND, OR, NOT etc.)
  • Data, Data Structures, and Representations (Information, binary and hexadecimal representations, string, integer, array, record, attributes, linked list, queue, stack, binary tree, character encoding, databases, data mining, flowcharts, fractals, graphs, hash table etc.) 
  • Computer Processes and Hardware (Operating systems, parallel processing, peripherals, image processing, sound processing, grid computing, priorities, RAID array, registers, multithreading, deadlock, fetch-execute cycle, scheduling, memory, cloud computing, turing machine etc.)
  • Communications and Networking (Client/server, computer networks, cryptography, e-commerce, encryption, parity bit, protocols, topologies etc.)
  • Interactions, Systems, and Society (Classification, graphical user interface, design, interaction, computer use, robotics, virus, ethics, social issues etc.)

Czech contest system is unique in the world in its use of a module which allows to solve algorithmic tasks by creating a program code from blocks and running it with appropriate feedback. Sets created from such tasks remind "Hour of code" and are available in English under the link https://bebras.pf.jcu.cz/test/archiv

The archive of all other tasks and tests is full-time accessible under the link Archiv (these tasks are only in Czech).

The guarantee of the national contest is the Department of Informatics at the Faculty of Education, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (www.pf.jcu.cz) and runs the contest with collaboration of Technical University Liberec. The patron of the contest is The Unit of School Informaticians, the Czech professional corporation of ICT teachers (www.jsi.cz). The contest is supported by Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic. Main supposers are RSJ Foundation and Web4U.

 

There are some papers about the contest written in English which are available to download.