How OzCLO changed my life, Part 1

A wet morning in the March of 2009. I am accompanying four bedraggled and somewhat confused Year 9 students across the campus of Macquarie University, looking for the right building. The students are taking part in a relatively new competition, news of which made its way through to my school only a few weeks earlier.

This was my first contact with the OzCLO competition. But emphatically not the last.

When the school at which I was then working received a flyer for the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad, the office initially passed it on to our head of IT - the word “Computational” must have tipped the balance. Fortunately for me, the head of IT decided that he was too busy to take an interest in anything new that week, and he passed it down the line to our head of languages. Would anyone in the department be interested in a new linguistics competition? Sure, I said. I’d studied linguistics at university (long ago), and thought it sounded interesting.

And so it began. That day at Macquarie, I had the pleasure of meeting some of the competition organisers, and more importantly I sampled some of the competition problems, which brought back joyful memories of puzzling out the intricacies of language structure with my fellow linguistics students all those years ago in the University of Sydney’s introductory linguistics course, presided over by the legendary Bill Foley. Although I completed two years of linguistics, I eventually decided on a double major in classics. But the seed had been planted.

I remained the OzCLO “supervisor” at the school for the next five years, and one of our teams made it through to the national round, in 2013. This was another new experience for me: a real competition atmosphere, a genuine sense of excitement among the students, since they knew that the next step was potentially the experience of a lifetime: a trip to the International Linguistics Olympiad, held that year in Manchester in England.

My Year 12 hopefuls missed out that year, and at the end of 2014 I was on the move to a new school. And it was at this new school that my interest in OzCLO was given fresh impetus, to put it mildly. To be continued…