BeLLE: Detecting National Differences in Computational Thinking and Computer Science Through an International Challenge

The Bebras challenge is an international initiative to engage school pupils with computer science and computational thinking via an annual challenge designed by computer science experts and educators. BeLLE is an international consortium focusing on international comparisons of standard challenge task banks. The consortium uses the ViLLE platform to manage the challenge as it offers a digital exercise-based learning environment with comprehensive learning analytics. The goal is to learn more about students’ knowledge in computer science and computational thinking in order to provide information for curriculum development and other educational planning and research. BeLLE started in 2021 with a pilots in Hungary and India. After the successful pilot, the consortium expanded substantially in the following year, many multiple choice questions were transformed into interactive tasks, and the process of organizing the challenge in ViLLE was refined. In this paper, we present some results of the challenge conducted within the BeLLE consortium in 2022. Over 90,000 students (47 % girls, 53 % boys) participated in the challenge in total through BeLLE. The results show that most students across countries and age groups get less than half of the maximum scores. The difference between girls and boys become apparent in Hungary and Lithuania: in the two oldest age groups (14–16 and 16–19 years old) boys score higher than girls. The time spent on the challenge is often 30 to 40 min with a difference between girls and boys in Hungary and Lithuania: boys use either less or more time than girls.