Register for ACM India Education Webinar on 31 October with Valentina Dagiene: "Bebras: Computer Science Challenge as a Valuable Learning Experience"
October 20, 2020
Teaching computational thinking at school is a recent phenomenon in India. Since 2016, ACM India's education initiative, CSpathshala, has been promoting computational thinking by providing a curriculum, teaching aids and training to teachers free of charge. As part of the ACM India Education Webinar Series, CSpathshala brings you teacher-oriented webinars that present innovative ways to make the task of teaching computational thinking easier.
Register now for "Bebras: Computer Science Challenge as a Valuable Learning Experience", to be presented on Saturday 31 October 2020 at 4 pm IST by Valentina Dagiene, Informatics Professor at Vilnius University, Lithuania.
Although this is a teacher-oriented initiative, educators, academicians and industry professionals are welcome to attend the webinar. Feel free to forward this communication to those who would be interested.
Note : You can also stream this webinar on your mobile device, including smartphone and tablet.
Duration : 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)
Abstract: Gamification and contests play an important role for learners as a source of inspiration, motivation, innovation, and attraction. When students start learning the basic concepts of Computer Science (CS), very soon they can find a place where they are able to demonstrate their skills, share interests, and to compare their work to others. Running competitions in informatics for school students for more than 20 years, we have noticed that the students consider the contest experience very engaging and exciting as a learning experience. Competitions are also very useful and important networking events. This talk will deliberate on the role of computer science challenges as a learning experience.
Interest in contests essentially depends on the tasks and environment. Attraction, invention, tricks, surprise should be desirable features of each task presented to participants. Generating and designing interesting tasks is one of the most important issues, bringing students into the competition movement.
Beaver (in Lithuanian, "Bebras") is an international initiative whose goal is to promote Informatics and Computational Thinking among pupils of all ages, as well as teachers. Currently there are 67 countries in the Bebras network.
Presenter:
Prof. Valentina Dagiene is Informatics Professor at Vilnius University in Lithuania. The interests include CS teaching and learning strategies, puzzle-based learning, intelligent technologies for education, learning objects, learning personalization, and CS curricula development for schools. She has published over 200 scientific papers and the same number of methodological works, has written more than 50 textbooks in the field of informatics and information technology for schools. She coordinated over 30 national and international projects on CS education.
She is working in various expert groups and work groups, organizing Olympiads in Informatics among pupils, chairing conferences and workshops, also engaged in technology enhanced learning and computational thinking. She is a member of the International Steering Committee on Olympiads in Informatics and established the International Conference on Olympiads in Informatics. In 2004 she established the International Challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinking (Bebras) which runs each year in more than 60 countries. Dagiene is Editor of two international journals: Informatics in Education (since 2002) and Olympiads in Informatics (since 2007). She is acknowledged by honorary gold medal for contributions to school Informatics in Europe established by ETH (Zurich, Switzerland, 2011), and Ada Lovelace Computing Excellence Award by the European Commission (2016).
Host:
Vipul Shah, Head of Education and Skilling, Global CSR, Tata Consultancy Services and Head of CSpathshala
