Bebras in the Digital Game <Captain Bebras> for Students’ Computational Thinking Abilities

Abstract

Bebras is widely known and used to enhance and examine students' computational thinking abilities. In order to make the testing process more intriguing, this study developed a digital game <Captain Bebras> with historical narrative background. This study aims to examine elementary school students' computational thinking abilities playing the game. The digital game simulates the historical events of the Great Voyage time with a map showing various tasks that the player has to perform with computational thinking abilities. Eight themes were classified by Bebras International Computational Thinking, including abstraction, logics, data analysis, decomposition, algorithms, simulation, system evaluation, and generalization. The core theory of each theme is integrated into the game stages, and the content of the Bebras Challenge is also used as the source of the tasks and the scoring base. By comparing students' gaming results with the traditional Bebras Challenge tests before and after the digital game, the researchers investigate students' improvement of their computational thinking abilities and the usefulness of <Captain Bebras>.