Students from Loreto Letterkenny, St. Eunan’s College, St. Columba’s Comprehensive and Coláiste Ailigh joined over 1,000 secondary school students nation-wide taking part in the Preliminary Round of the 2020 All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) this week.
Run by the ADAPT SFI Research Centre for Digital Media Technology, the AILO contest challenges secondary school students to apply logic and reasoning skills to solve complex puzzles in unfamiliar languages.
The contest helps students to develop transferable skills relevant to maths, coding and languages
Researchers from ADAPT have run over 30 free national workshops to help students improve their problem-solving strategies and prepare for the Olympiad.
Speaking ahead of the round, Prof Vincent Wade, Director of ADAPT said, the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) challenges students to use their lateral thinking skills to solve puzzles in languages from all over the globe.
“Students must analyse the data they are given to work out the ‘rules’ of this new language,” he said.
The top 100 students from the Preliminary Round will qualify for the National Final on March 11 in Dublin City University.
Four students will go on to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in Latvia in July 2020.
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