If you have heard a buzz about ‘Bebras’ coming from the Senior School this week, you will be pleased to know the excitement has firmly taken root here in the Junior School as well!

Much like our older counterparts, our students are not swapping their keyboards for nature studies—though for the uninitiated, “bebras” is indeed the Lithuanian word for Beaver.

Instead, our Junior students are joining over 3 million students from across the globe to take part in the Bebras Computing Challenge. This week, during their Computing lessons, the classrooms will be transformed into hubs of intense concentration and logical problem-solving.

What is the Challenge?
While the Senior School focuses on complex algorithmic thinking, the Junior version of the challenge introduces these high-level concepts through colourful, engaging, and interactive puzzles.

The goal is to encourage Computational Thinking. Put simply, this means looking at a problem and working out a logical, step-by-step way to solve it. As the Senior School Head of Computer Science noted, this is the foundation of all coding, but for our Junior students, it feels much more like solving riddles than sitting an exam.

Why do we take part?
The Bebras Challenge is run in the UK by the Oxford University University and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It provides a wonderful opportunity for our students to:

Develop resilience: Trying again when a puzzle is tricky.

Practice logic: Breaking big problems into small steps.

Have fun: The puzzles are designed to be enjoyable!

We have a fantastic track record of developing strong computer scientists at The Abbey, and it all starts here in the Junior School. We are hoping to see many of our students achieve Gold Certificates (awarded to the top 10% of entrants nationally), but more importantly, we want them to enjoy the satisfaction of cracking a difficult code.

We wish all our Junior problem-solvers the very best of luck in their lessons this week. We look forward to sharing their successes with you soon!