STUDENTS from Commonweal School reached the final of a national competition.

Felix Bowyer, Jay Kirkham, and Luke Simons were invited to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as finalists in the UK Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge.

They were among the top 60 highest achieving students invited to the final round in their Elite 16-to-18 age group out of the 6,415 people that entered. They received their finalists certificates at a prize-giving ceremony at Hertford College.

The competition is supported by Google and 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 had 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 were then invited to the Department of Computer Science at Oxford for the finals over two weekends in February.

For more information, visit bebras.uk, email kiri.walden@cs.ox.ac.uk, or call 01865 610692.