Students from Mountrath CS secured the highly prestigious Linguistics Olympiad team title in one of Ireland’s toughest school competitions.
The All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) is a national contest in which secondary school students must develop their own strategies for solving complex problems.
At the national event at DIT in Grangegormanrecently, the four person team from Mountrath CS showed they had all the answers, in a competition which attracted over 2,000 participants.
The winning team members were Domhnall O’Farrell, Chris Carew, Aisling Page and Alex Moore.
“This is a fantastic achievement for our students,” said teacher Denis Boland.
“It is a really good competition for the students. It really challenges them and is based on problem solving,” he said.
He said it is a far different approach to learning information for exams. “This is really geared towards people who can problem solve. Some people who do really well in exams, when they come to this, they really struggle,” Mr Boland said.
Revision and prior study can’t be done for this competition and students have to engage in group work and also use a broad range of knowledge.
For the problem solved by the young Mountrath scholars, the team members put their knowledge of Greek, French and Spanish to good use to come up with the answer.
They were required to identify and pair up two lists of place names (countries and capitals) written in Phoenician script.
The problem was difficult because the transliterations (of names which of course didn’t exist at the time Phoenician was spoken and written) was from the names in their own language rather than English (e.g. Hungary was Magyar, Armenia was Hayastan, etc.)
Phoenician script is right-to-left and shows only consonants, not vowels, like Hebrew and Arabic that derived from it.
However, the students didn’t get to bask in the glory too long as their focus quickly turned back to exams.
“Their orals were on this week, so it was back to the grindstone,” Mr Boland said.
The problems to be solved by students are based on fascinating languages from around the globe. AILO is run by the ADAPT Centre.
More than 14,000 Irish students have competed in the Olympiad to date. The Problem-Solving Initiative will facilitate further growth of the Olympiad, including the introduction of regional problem-solving workshops for students and teachers.
Logic
No prior knowledge of linguistics or a second language is required, as even the hardest problems require only logical thinking, patient work, and a willingness to think around corners.
AILO introduces students to the application of logic and linguistics (i.e. the study of human language) to problems of language understanding and translation. The goal is to develop students’ problem-solving skills and to inspire them to consider the fascinating range of careers at the intersection of computing, linguistics and language.
A survey of participants at the AILO 2016 national final in March 2016 revealed that 93% of participants claim that the contest has helped develop their problem-solving ability, thus enhancing the lateral thinking skills necessary for STEM careers.
81% said they would consider studying computing and languages at third-level, compared to 47% before the contest.
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