The UK Bebras Challenge, the nation’s largest computing 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 computing, 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 computing 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.
Website: LINK
