The Genesis of a Bebras Task

Abstract

This paper reports the milestones a task proposal takes from its initial conception until its use in the Bebras International Challenge of Informatics and Computational Thinking and the experiences that Switzerland has with the procedures with the intent to share best-practices. This includes the Swiss Bebras Task Workshop, the International Bebras Task Workshop, the generation of the Swiss Task Set, the adaptation of a task proposal for the Swiss Bebras Challenge, the Contest System and the Brochure. Although the process is described from the point of view of the Swiss Bebras Challenge, the processes in some other participating countries are similar. The description of the process is accompanied by a task proposal of which the changes over time are documented. The basic findings are that during the year-long process a task proposal experiences several (re-)considerations, several stages of reworking and adaptation but that these reiterations serve towards quality improvement and ensure that each task proposal is up to standard to be offered to the more than 21, 000 participants in Switzerland annually or even (up to and including the International Bebras Task Workshop 2019) 2.78 million students world-wide annually. This paper is targeted at the general audience interested in the process of developing high quality tasks, be it for contests or for general use. It may also be of interest to people working within the Bebras community to compare the Swiss process to their processes of preparing tasks.