"Newts" at Cornell's North American Computational Linguistics Olympics!

This is just one tiny glimpse of how New Roots teachers and staff “seize the day” to engage students with the many rich opportunities that our community has to offer.  My challenge as a new blogger will be staying on top of everything that’s happening and getting out the good word!!

Just for fun, a daring group of New Roots students ("Newts") competed in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympics last week thanks to Maria Gimma, Spanish and videography teacher.

Held at Cornell, NACLO is a contest for students in grades 6-12 in which contestants compete by solving interesting and challenging puzzles in linguistics and computational linguistics.  Requiring no previous knowledge of linguistics or computing, these puzzles can be solved by analytic reasoning alone, and serve to introduce students to this exciting field.

This experience certainly did engage New Roots participants Antonio Triana, Ray Vanek-Johnson, Soren Mortensen and Kai Haskins.  As Antonio said, "This experience opened up my eyes to the possibilities of investigating more about linguistics.  It was a fun experience for me and I felt very challenged."

Ray Vanek-Johnson added, "While very challenging and hard for a new participant, this competition was still fun and quite interesting.  For instance, I got to learn a bit more about the language of the Maori indigenous people of New Zealand.  I also learned about the script in which one of the Indonesian languages is written.  I never knew anything about their alphabet before.  This is why overall, I would say that this competition was challenging and even if I did not place, I still won because I learned a lot."

What I really loved about the participants' comments is that they combined words like "challenge" and "hard" and even "ROUGH!" with words like "fun!"

Maria Gimma was as enthusiastic as the students, but for a slightly different reason.  "One of the reasons I like teaching is because of these WOW moments that my students experience," she said.  This was definitely one of them:  the twinkle in their eye and the excitement in their voices as they discussed how they tackled their challenges made my day."

Ms. Gimma, it made MY day that you went above and beyond to give our students a taste of the exciting applications of natural-language processing in the 21st century, broadening their horizons and teaching them a thrill of meeting a new challenge head on.  I am grateful for the inspiration!