Congratulations to Year 11 Ben who took first place in a computational thinking challenge at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

Talented Ben was invited to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford on Saturday 8 February as a finalist in a UK-wide competition – the UK Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge.

Benjamin was among the top 56 highest achieving students to reach the final out of 22,722 participant students entered into the first round for this age group. In the Seniors (14-16) age category he achieved a first place medal which was presented at a prize-giving ceremony at Hertford College by Peter Millican, Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford.

The UK Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge, supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is designed to get students excited about computing and computational thinking. It is a problem-solving contest with questions inspired by topics in computer science. In the first round, held in their own schools, students have to try and solve as many problems as possible in the allotted time. There are six age categories. The highest scoring students from the four oldest age groups (Elite, Seniors, Intermediate, and Juniors) were then invited to the Department of Computer Science at Oxford for the finals over two weekends in January/February.