A Markdown-based Open Toolchain for Writing, Processing, and Publishing Bebras Tasks

Abstract

A considerable energy is put by the international Bebras community into creating tasks for each year's contest. Over each of the past years, more than 100 tasks were worked on and readied. They cover many aspects of computer science in fun, original ways, and are aimed at students from age 6 already to the end of high school, with several difficulty levels. Many of these tasks have high-quality explanations and references in their “It’s Informatics” section.

In our opinion, they deserve both (a) a more automated processing workflow than what is currently being done, and (b) a better visibility than they are getting now during (and outside) the contest weeks. In this poster proposal, we propose a new Markdown-based task format and accompanying toolchain as concrete tools for an easier interchange of tasks and processing of task metadata. We show how many current aspects of task validation, selection, editing, and publication can be simplified with that toolchain. We also detail how its architecture and extensibility can be used to further repurpose tasks and republish them off-contest in an open platform for teachers to use them as teaching resources.