Valentina Dagiene, Gabriele Stupuriene

• The paper discusses the issue of supporting informatics (computer science) education through competitions for lower and upper secondary school students (8–19 years old). Competitions play an important role for learners as a source of inspiration, innovation, and attraction. Running contests in informatics for school students for many years, we have noticed that the students consider the contest experience very engaging and exciting as well as a learning experience. A contest is an excellent instrument to involve students in problem solving activities. An overview of infrastructure and development of an informatics contest from international level to the national one (the Bebras contest on informatics and computer fluency, originated in Lithuania) is presented. The performance of Bebras contests in 23 countries during the last 10 years showed an unexpected and unusually high acceptance by school students and teachers. Many thousands of students participated and got a valuable input in addition to theirThe paper discusses the issue of supporting informatics (computer science) education through competitions for lower and upper secondary school students (8–19 years old). Competitions play an important role for learners as a source of inspiration, innovation, and attraction. Running contests in informatics for school students for many years, we have noticed that the students consider the contest experience very engaging and exciting as well as a learning experience. A contest is an excellent instrument to involve students in problem solving activities. An overview of infrastructure and development of an informatics contest from international level to the national one (the Bebras contest on informatics and computer fluency, originated in Lithuania) is presented. The performance of Bebras contests in 23 countries during the last 10 years showed an unexpected and unusually high acceptance by school students and teachers. Many thousands of students participated and got a valuable input in addition to their regular informatics lectures at school. In the paper, the main attention is paid to the developed tasks and analysis of students’ task solving results in Lithuania.…