Over the next two weeks (6th – 17th November 2023) students across the whole school will once again be taking part in the Bebras Computing Challenge. All students in the Senior School who study Computer Science, as well as those in the Junior School from Lower I upwards, will be participating. This international competition, which runs in over 60 countries, is organised in the UK by Oxford University in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The challenges focus on Computational and Logical Thinking and are designed to get students excited about computing. They are completed online during one lesson.
Robert Bradley, Head of Computer Science, said “in the Gateway article last year I stated that taking part in the competition ‘will give [the students] an opportunity to demonstrate their amazing talent as they compete against students from around the world.’ And what is great is that they did!”
Over 300 of our students took part with 56 of them being awarded a Gold certificate indicating they scored in the top 10% of the country. (Over 365,000 students took part in the UK last year and over 3 million worldwide.)
These students went on to take part in the Oxford University Computing Challenge. All those students, plus any others that achieve a Gold Certificate this year, will take part in the OUCC sometime between the 15th – 19th January 2024.
Students in the Senior School who do not study Computer Science anymore but would like to take part again in the Bebras Challenge are invited to drop into the department one lunchtime over the next two weeks to take the challenge.
And what’s still great is the data centre that hosts UK Bebras obtains its electricity from wind farms. When the wind doesn’t blow the energy comes from the grid but when it does blow there is more than enough for the servers and the excess is returned to the grid. The net result is that UK Bebras is using 100% wind energy overall. The heat from cooling the servers, when everyone is beavering away, is used to heat buildings in the neighbourhood.