Introducing Computing to Underserved Tribal Communities Through the Bebras Challenge

Abstract

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in partnership with ACM India has been organizing the Bebras Challenge in India since 2018. To date, over 500,000 students have participated in the challenge. Tata Steel Foundation (TSF) initiated "The Thousand Schools Program" in 2015, in remote regions of Odisha and Jharkhand to improve children's learning levels and expose them to new knowledge areas and skills. These regions are tribally dense, forested, and have hilly terrain. They are highly underserved in terms of schools and teachers. The majority of the students are first-generation learners with no home support. A large number of them fall out of schooling and get engaged in child labor. TCS and TCF started an experiment to assess if computing can be introduced to students from such underserved communities through Bebras tasks. For a period of 6-8 weeks in September-October 2022, around 10,000 students solved a total of 15 Bebras tasks of varying difficulty levels.