The International Linguistics Olympiad: Preparing High School Students for the Study of Human Language and Computation

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More than 100 of the world's brightest and most motivated high school students will gather in Pittsburgh in July 2011 for the 9th International Linguistics Olympiad. Unlike math and science Olympiads, which focus on material students have already mastered, linguistics Olympiads introduce new material through logic puzzles in languages unfamiliar to the students. In the course of solving a puzzle, the students can discover something about the grammar or sounds of a language, its conceptual system, its culture, or its historical relationship to other languages. In addition to fostering insight into human linguistic and cultural diversity, this competition fosters meta-linguistic reasoning that is essential for computer science, language technologies, and indeed any career involving analytical problem-solving skills and the ability to present a logical argument supported by data. Because it has been the tradition of linguistics Olympiads to assign half of the score for the written explanation of the answer, the contests also encourage the ability to clearly present a hypothesis and explain how it is supported by the data.More information and past contest puzzles can be found at: http://www.ioling.org and http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu.