Last week, three teams of students from Year 10 and Year 11 competed in Round 1 of The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO). This is a volunteer-run contest about language for secondary school students. The contest challenges students with fiendish and fun linguistic problems. Their mission, in teams of four, is to solve problems about fascinating real languages. In previous years there have been puzzles to solve using extracts from:

• Arhuaco – a language spoken by the Arhuaco people in Northern Colombia
• Wik-Mungkan - a Paman language spoken on the western side of Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia by around 1,650 people, most of whom live at Aurukun
• Tzeltal - a Mayan language spoken by about 450,000 people in the Mexican state of Chiapas
• Ligurian - a Romance language spoken by approximately 500,000 people in the Liguria region of Northern Italy.

The challenging competition is perfect for those who love solving puzzles and for those who enjoy learning languages, maths or computing, as many of the skills are transferable.

Congratulations to all our teams who demonstrated incredible focus, collaboration and problem solving on the day.

Gabriele Lettice
Learning Coordinator for Acquired Languages and German teacher

Emma Rieger
Enrichment and Extended Learning