The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) is a contest for high school students. It challenges them to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages. The program is designed for students up to 12th grade. High school students don't typically know what linguistics and computational linguistics are, so they probably don't know if they are interested in it until they try the problems. However, students who like languages, maths, computers, and natural sciences are most likely to be interested in this competition.

Any secondary school student who enjoys the sample problems on the web site is encouraged to participate.

The first OzCLO was held in 2008 at Melbourne and Sydney. The three winning teams from the First Rounds in both states competed to solve problems in Icelandic agreement, Finite State Automata, Mayan hieroglyphs, Manam Pile directionals, and spectrograms of English in the National Round in August. Competitors ranged from year 9 to year 12, and came from both state and private schools. The competition was a huge success and a lot of fun for all involved.

In 2009, OZCLO was held at Australian National University in Canberra, Griffith University in Queensland, University of South Australia in Adelaide, University of Melbourne in Melbourne, University of Sydney in Sydney, University of Western Australia in Perth. We sent Australian team to the finals of the International Linguistics Olympiads, in Wroclaw, Poland from 26th to 31st July:

Team:

Ross McGachey (Immanuel College, SA)
Krysia Choros (St Peters Lutheran College, QLD)
Sarah Twomey (St Peters Lutheran College, QLD)

Coach:

Dr Dominique Estival (University of Sydney)

Assistant Coach:

Pawel Mazur (Macquarie University)