This week, students at Renmark High School competed once again in the annual first round of the OzCLO competition. The OzCLO (Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad) not only promotes higher order thinking through complex problem solving but also provides an opportunity for students to experience the behaviour of other languages in comparison with English. For example, the definite article, ‘the’ was not a part of some languages analysed. This year we entered four junior and two senior teams in the first-round of the nationwide competition.

This year our students had to decode the following five unfamiliar languages;

Rotuman - An Austronesian language spoken by the indigenous people living on the Rotuma group of South Pacific islands.

Waanyi – An Australian Indigenous language spoken across the borders of the Northern Territory and Queensland

Russian (baby talk) – The language of 2-year-old Russian children as they learn the sounds of their language.

Arhuaco (also known as Ica and Bintuk) – Spoken by the Arhuaco people in Northern Columbia, of which there are an estimated 8000 speakers

Wik-Mungaan – A Paman language spoken on the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, with around 1650 native speakers.

Teams collaborated effectively, sharing their deep thinking with each other to find solutions to each question. Congratulations to our Renmark High School representatives who undertook the challenge over the course of three hours;

Junior Teams: Anja T, Stephen F, Fletcher H, Jemma H, Kallum M, Jocelyn G, Teleah Z, Leila P, Amber P, Tahlia P, Will L ,Logan F, Meegan G, Emily C, Mikayla M, Saraya G

Senior Teams: Lachie G, Alex T, Sakina Q, Karina S, Tamika M, Jorja K, Kelli W

Jasmine Sotiroulis- OzCLO Coordinator