Behind the Shoulders of Bebras Teams: Analyzing How They Interact with the Platform to Solve Tasks

In the Italian Bebras Challenge on Informatics and Computational Thinkings, an interactive online platform is used to display attractive tasks to teams of pupils, and evaluate the answers they submit. We instrumented the platform in order to collect also data concerning the interactions of pupils with the system. We analyzed this data according to a multidimensional model use to describe such interaction, and collected many overall statistics on the problem solving process and teams’ behavior. The fine grained data we logged was also useful to analyze how the teams engaged with specific tasks, which we designed as easy and turned out to be difficult. By looking at the data, we were able to explain the unexpected difficulties, nailing down what had distracted or confused many solvers.