English News

OzCLO 2017

The Australian Computational Linguistics Olympiad, or OZCLO, is a competition where students from years 10-12 compete in teams of four against other schools, in order to solve language puzzles formed from real languages around the world. But this isn’t just languages with English letters, oh no. That would be too simple. From Nepali to Abkhazi, we translate to English, and back again, and everything in between.

OzCLO was held on Wednesday March 8 this year. After school, all members of teams came to MU2, where the excitement was palpable and the room was filled with chatter and anticipation. We sat down, organised ourselves into teams, and everyone was chatting and laughing, while the teachers worked frantically to organise everything before 2:30. At 2:29 a countdown began, then the clock ticked to 2:30 and we refreshed our webpages and began the competition.

The questions were difficult, but with hard work, perseverance, logic and reasoning, use of other languages, our own knowledge, and of course, the lollies and chocolates we were provided with, each team worked hard at every question. We all approached them in different ways- at one point, the members in my team used Japanese to identify the rules of the language we were attempting to solve.

OzCLO allows us a chance to use our knowledge of language and of puzzle solving, and has been a tradition at the school for a few years now. I participated last year, with the same team as I am this year, and I feel that the experience of the competition helps bring year levels and teachers together as one, giving us a chance to do something a little out of the ordinary at school.

On behalf of all the students who participated in OzCLO, I’d like to thank Mr Mahalingam, Mr McQuaid, Dr Schroor, Ms Banaag and Ms Morgan for supporting us before and during the competition. Without the training days, the superb organisation and fantastic advice and help that we were given, I’m sure that the day would not have been as successful as it was. Here’s to another year of OzCLO!

Nethmini Kotalawala - Year 11