Reasoning on Children’s Cognitive Skills in an Informatics Contest: Findings and Discoveries from Finland, Lithuania, and Sweden Valentina Dagiene 1 , Linda Mannila 2 , Timo Poranen 3 , Lennart Rolandsson 4 , and Gabriele Stupuriene 1 1 Vilnius University, Lithuania 2 ˚ Abo Akademi University, Finland; Link¨ oping University, Sweden 3 University of Tampere, Finland 4 KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Abstract. In this paper, we present the results from a multi-national study of students’ results in the international IT contest ”Bebras”. Be- bras provides motivating and game-like tasks in the format of multiple- choice questions and interactive problems to students in grades 2–12. Our study focuses on the results of nearly 8 000 students aged 10–13 in Finland (n=852), Sweden (n=201) and Lithuania (n=7 022), using gender, task and country as the underlying variables. In addition to pre- senting the overall results of the three student groups, we also analyse a subset of tasks in common according to Bloom’s taxonomy and put for- ward detailed results for these tasks with regard to gender and country. The results show that there is no difference in performance between boys and girls in this age group. Our findings also indicate that there was a slight mismatch between the difficulty level of the tasks used in the con- test and students’ actual abilities; finding more efficient and trustworthy ways of evaluating difficulty levels upfront and choosing a suitable task set is hence important for upcoming contests. Keywords: Informatics education, computer science education, computing ed- ucation, competitions, “Bebras” contest, tasks, cognitive skills. 1 Introduction The current status of informatics 1 education is unsatisfactory in many coun- tries [12]. Although computers, applications and information technology (IT) in general is an increasingly natural part of the everyday work at schools, focus is mainly put on basic digital literacy skills while the underlying principles are left uncovered. This situation has been recognised as a problem in many countries [17] and recently the introduction of computing in the curriculum in e.g. the 1 The terminology varies between countries, for instance, in the USA “Computer Sci- ence” is a widely acknowledged term, while UK started to use “Computing” a few years ago.