Abstract:

Bebras Challenge is a worldwide contest focused on the development of computational thinking of pupils. In the contest pupils meet problems within tasks which by their concept transcend to general problem-solving skills of every individual such as abstraction, decomposition, evaluation, generalisation and identifying patterns. These general skills are supplemented by specialized computer science skills, especially algorithmization and related programming, potentially debugging. Each task is classified into at least one of above described fields. A pupil solves 12 such tasks in the contest for which he/she has 40 minutes. This year 20 % of Czech primary schools participated in this contest.

In the Czech Republic there exist a lot of social excluded localities and one of the biggest issues of the educational system in the Czech Republic is a deepening social disadvantage. In the field of digital technologies three levels of digital divide were identified. Our research motivation is to ascertain if there are only those digital divides or there are also those that lie in computational thinking.

Our main research aim is thus to ascertain divides in computational thinking of pupils from schools with a higher number of socially disadvantaged pupils (abbr. schools with HNSDP), compared to pupils from other schools. More specifically, the aim is to describe if in Bebras Challenge performances of pupils from schools with HNSDP show statistically significant divides compared to performances of pupils from other schools. Another research aim is to ascertain in which areas of computational thinking statistically significant divides exist between pupils from schools with HNSDP and pupils from other schools.

To reach stated aims, we identified four schools with HNSDP which participated in Bebras Challenge. A number of 481 pupils competed at schools with HNSDP and 85 173 pupils competed at other schools. In the database of Bebras Challenge, we found contestants in the age category Mini (usually pupils at the age of 9-11), Benjamin (age 11-13 years) and Kadet (age 13-15 years). We divided those contestants into two groups according to the fact whether they attend the school with HNSDP or not. We compared contestants´ performances of those two groups by using statistical methods, especially independent samples t-test and Chi-square test.

Results show the statistically significant lower average number of obtained points in all age categories of pupils from schools with HNSDP compared to pupils from other schools. Moreover, we discovered the statistically significant lower successfulness of pupils from schools with HNSDP compared to pupils from other schools in fields of computational thinking such as abstraction, algorithmic design and logical thinking; we could not, on the contrary, prove those differences in fields of evaluation, prediction and debugging.

Attained results demonstrate significant divide in computational thinking between pupils from schools with HNSDP and other schools, thus it can be perceived as another form of digital divide. Since Computer Science education is in the beginning in many countries there is a need for elimination of this divide and prevention of its deepening. As a result, it may improve the access of socially disadvantaged people to newly emerging job positions which ask for deeper understanding of digital technology and related computational thinking.

Keywords:

Computational thinking, digital divide.