Bebras is an international initiative to promote Informatics among teachers and among students of all ages. The Bebras method is to organize easily accessible and highly motivational online challenges in many countries.

Each country-wide Bebras challenge asks small, interesting questions that can be answered without prior knowledge about Informatics, but are clearly related to Informatics concepts and require thinking in and about information, discrete structures, computation, data processing, as well as algorithmic concepts. That is, each Bebras task can both demonstrate an aspect of Informatics and test the participant’s Informatics-related talent.

Since 2004, Bebras has quickly spread across the world and 2012 mor than 500.000 students participated. Bebras is the non-school activity in Informatics education with the largest audience.

The Bebras International Task Workshops, where experts from all Bebras countries meet to discuss and prepare tasks, is crucial to the success of the Bebras challenge. Each country provides a set of task proposals, and the whole pool of proposals is then discussed at the workshop.

The national contest organizers make up their national task set from this pool. A subset of the task pool is determined to be mandatory and used in all national Bebras contests.

At the 2012 International Bebras Task Workshop 27 countries participated. Part of the workshop was a one day symposium for local teachers end researchers with ten keynote speakers from various countries. Beside developing the Bebras task pool, the specific goals of the 2012 workshop were to develop new quality standards for Bebras task proposals (with revised Informatics concepts for high education) and to elaborate strategy on new kinds of interactive tasks.