On Wednesday 13^th March, 16 students from Years 8 to 12 competed for the second year in a row in the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzClo). This year we entered five of the eighteen teams in South Australia: three in the junior level (Years 9-10) and two in the senior level (Years 11-12).

The OzCLO contest is held in two rounds, with the First Round; a two-hour competition held at exactly the same time online nation-wide. Participants work in teams of four on a range of language analysis problems.
The top three teams for each region then go on to the National Round, which has the same format as the First Round.

The winners of the National Round are offered the opportunity of representing Australia at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO), which will be held in South Korea.

This year our students had to decode six languages unfamiliar to all of them. These languages included Welsh, Harmongolian, Oscan (an ancient Italic language related to Latin), Pitjantjatjara, Lopit (spoken by 50 000 people in South Sudan), Ndebele (spoken mainly in Zimbabwe). Teams collaborated effectively, sharing their deep thinking and reflections with each other to find solutions to each question. Peculiarities were discovered about other languages, including one in which the article, ‘the’ does not exist and that writing systems in other languages vary in terms of the direction in which you read them.

Renmark High School was the only secondary school in regional South Australia competing this year.

Congratulations to our Renmark High School representatives who undertook the challenge over the course of three hours; Paul Chandler, Adam Chandler, Justice Cox, Anastacia Festa, Joshua Goody, Amanjot Kaur, Sasha Petricevic, Lachlan Goody, Tyrone Adams, Alex Teakle, Lara Patrick, Stella Anderson, Chelsea Zuccaro, Colby Lawton, Amber Petricevic, Chloe Brown.

Jasmine Tassios

OzCLO Coordinator