As you may recall last November all Computer Science students across the school took part in the Bebras Challenge; an international algorithmic thinking competition run in the UK by Hertford College, University of Oxford. Over 60 Abbey students achieved a Gold Certificate in this challenge, indicating that they scored in the top 10% of the country.

All Gold Certificate winners were given the opportunity to take part in the Oxford University Computing Challenge which takes place in January each year and tests the programming skills of those students invited to participate.

Twenty four Abbey students gave up their lunchtime or stayed after school last week to take part in this very difficult challenge. 

Mr Bradley summed up his feelings on their participation;

“I’m so proud of the performance of our students in a competition that is designed to challenge the very best programmers in the country at their age. Many of the contestants across the country will have been building their own apps and programs for many years and the fact that our students could compete at this level is a testament to their hard work and dedication in Computer Science.”

“I am confident that the Abbey School will continue to produce great Computer Scientists and programmers for many years to come.”

The use of AI was strictly forbidden in this year’s competition, noting the advances made with Generative AI over the past twelve months. Indeed Chris Roffey, the organiser, sent the following thoughts to all the schools’ coordinators;

“Something to think about: I am quite concerned about AIs in CS education. It would appear that AIs will be able to write better code than our students very soon – if they cannot already. It might be tempting to think that fighting against this and forbidding the use of AIs is simply fighting progress. However, I believe we will require developers who can analyse and evaluate programs written by AIs going forward. If all our students have been brought up with AIs doing the work for them then, perhaps, they will not have the knowledge or experience to be the future developers we need and be able to evaluate AI output. Perhaps the situation is going to be analogous to Maths in schools where some lessons are with calculators and some are not.”

This seems to mirror the School’s policy on the use of AI which recognises that students will need to know how to use AI to support their learning and work in the future, but that over-reliance on AI to produce work will limit their understanding and learning and students should learn to balance “process versus product” in their use of Generative AI in the future.

Well done again to all those Computer Science students who took part in the competition; you will be able to login and see your scores from Friday.