Computer Science students achieve top award

18 students from across NUAST have achieved the top Gold award in the annual Bebras Computing Challe (Computer Science - 08/12/2021)

The competition takes place every year and asks students to solve a series of computational thinking problems. Over 300,000 students took part from around the UK and 50 other countries with 500 students across all year groups from NUAST.

Students who achieve the Gold award are in the top 10% in the country and are invited to a further Oxford University Computing Competition held online in February.

The Bebras Challenge is structured as a series of 18 problem solving questions where students have to solve as many as they can in a short 40 minute time limit. Questions are broken down in to three levels of difficulty with the harder questions receiving negative points if they are answered incorrectly. Students must gain as many points as they can out of a possible 200 in total.

Mr Wood, Head of Computing, commented: “It is great that so many of our students took part in the Bebras Competition this year. We are really impressed with their results and especially those that have achieved the top Gold award. Problem solving is a major part of our subject and we hope to see all of these students in Computer Science roles in the future.”

Mr White, Principal, commended the students saying: “Well done to our Gold award students. To be in the top 10% of students nationally is a fantastic achievement and we wish students the best for the next round of the competition.”

Students that qualify can start to prepare for the online programming challenge at https://oucc.uk/ where practise questions are already available. The competition will take place between 7th - 11th February 2022.

For more information about the Bebras Computing Challenge, please see the following website: https://www.bebras.uk/