Abstract
The paper presents the Olimpiadi di Problem Solving, a mild and inclusive competition aimed to promote computational thinking and general problem-solving in Italian schools. We describe motivation, teaching strategies behind the initiative, as well as its structure, organization and give some sample of the problems proposed to students. We also present some data that show the broad participation of Italian schools to the initiative, and a preliminary analysis of the results obtained by the students in the last 5 editions, which suggests that the competition fosters deep learning of computational thinking knowledge and skills.
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Notes
- 1.
The project guide is entrusted to the Directorate-General for Education Guidelines (D.g. per gli ordinamenti scolastici e per l’autonomia scolastica) of MIUR.
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- 5.
These editions are comparable since all of them had 6 rounds, with the only exception of 2014/15. For that specific school year, we noted that two consecutive intermediate rounds had very similar results at all levels, so we normalized it to 6 rounds too.
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Appendix
Appendix
Example of a standard problem (team contest, primary school, grades 4–5, second training contest
Part A
Part B. Example of a standard problem (secondary school, grades 9–10, fifth training contest)
Part A
Part B. Example of a standard problem of pseudo-code reading (lower secondary school, grades 6–8, national final contest
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Borchia, R., Carbonaro, A., Casadei, G., Forlizzi, L., Lodi, M., Martini, S. (2018). Problem Solving Olympics: An Inclusive Education Model for Learning Informatics. In: Pozdniakov, S., Dagienė, V. (eds) Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering. ISSEP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11169. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_25
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