Three students from three Donegal schools have qualified for the National Final of the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad.
The students are Megan McGarvey from Loreto Letterkenny, Aoife Mongan from St. Columba’s Comprehensive, and Shyam Shaji from St. Eunan’s College.
They qualified having undertaken the Preliminary Round with 1100 other students in their own schools in February.
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”.
The National Final takes place on 11th March in Dublin City University where students will be challenged with individual and team competitions. Four students will go on to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in Latvia in July 2020.
So what is AILO?
AILO helps students to develop a powerful blend of problem-solving expertise and language competency, which are vital skills in today’s global economy. In 2018, the learning outcomes for students taking part in AILO were aligned to the Junior Certificates (JC) Key Skills / Statements of Learning (SoL) and the OECD PISA (2012/2015) collaborative and creative problem-solving competencies, highlighting how the competition supports the curriculum in Ireland. The contest also aims to inspire students to pursue the exciting range of careers combining computing, linguistics and languages.
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