Ireland, 04 March 2020: Over 100 students across 58 schools have qualified for the National Final of the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad.
They qualified having undertaken the Preliminary Round with 1100 other students across Ireland 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.
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