How OzCLO changed my life, Part 4

The Covid lockdowns were a miserable time for pretty much everyone, but for school students in particular. Being isolated from her friends and given less-than-inspiring work by her teachers drove my then 11-year-old daughter to distraction, and my wife and I both went to some lengths to improve her mood. (My wife did a good deal more than me in this regard.)

One day my daughter saw me working at one of my linguistics puzzles on the computer, and asked what it was all about. I explained after a fashion, and she remarked off-handedly that she might like to have a try at those sorts of puzzles.

So began a three-week period where I would try to produce a simplified language puzzle every night for us to do together. This was actually close to my 2016-era idea of very basic language puzzles as a small stepping stone towards OzCLO-style problems, and I found the challenge of re-working some of my earlier puzzles for a beginner a welcome distraction during a tedious and frustrating period. Her insistence that the puzzles be handwritten (!) ensured real care and effort on my part. And, with a bit of help from the side, she proved an apt solver:

Puzzle by Michael Salter, solution by Luna Salter (age 11).

When the lockdowns were over and we were both back at school, I was struck by how much we had both enjoyed the experience, and it led me to think: could this sort of thing be used more broadly in an educational setting? I thought of a recent presentation I had given to my Latin classes (“The Many Layers of Latin”) which could perhaps be supplemented by some simple language puzzles.

And so the idea was born. A series of presentations on various language-related topics, garnished with simple puzzles which, to give the whole thing a cheerily competitive edge, could be solved by students in groups, with prizes on offer. I worked on the presentations and the puzzles steadily during 2022 and 2023…and now here we are.

And looking back, I owe a lot to OzCLO.