Piaget’s cognitive development in bebras tasks - A descriptive analysis by age groups

Abstract

The Bebras contest started as a small computer-science competition in Eastern Europe and is now well-established all around the world. In the meantime, the challenge also addresses primary school students; in Germany since 2015. In the light of the ongoing discussion on introducing computer science in primary education, the question of whether the tasks differ between the age groups moved to the focus. So, we analyzed how Bebras tasks look like, especially comparing the different age of the participants. Here, only characteristics of the task descriptions are examined, showing that both, text and pictures differ through the age groups. Their complexity increases and also, addressed objects and subjects manifest a clear separation of Piaget’s stage of cognitive development between primary school and secondary school students. All the findings enable to concisely characterize Bebras tasks for their use in regular computer-science classes or for further research on the cognitive processes involved in solving those tasks.