Published on: 17 May 2018



A total of nine teams from Christ Church participated in the recent OzCLO competition held state wide with one of our teams progressing to the National Round and earning the honour of top team in WA and third place nationally.

OzCLO, which stands for the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad, is a contest for high school students between Years 9 to 12. During the competition, participants are challenged with fascinating linguistic problems in real languages.

“This was our best year ever. Our top team comprising of Year 12 boys Albert Smith, Ben Kempson, Akio Ho and Daniel Stark beat all the other WA schools in the National Round and were just a whisker away from qualifying for the International Round,” says Head of Languages, Nicky Griffin-Appadoo.

“All boys selected to represent Christ Church in the competition needed to demonstrate strength in maths, languages and/or computing and participate in training at UWA where they learnt how to decode language patterns to make new meaning. Some of the languages used in past competitions include native American languages and even Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

“Of our participating teams, we were pleased to be awarded four gold, two silver, and three bronze.”

“As a prize, each member of our top team received a complimentary 12-month subscription to the Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus Online which is also available school-wide for the benefit of all students at Christ Church.”

Other WA schools participating in OzCLO included Scotch College, St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School, Methodist Ladies’ College, Presbyterian Ladies’ College and St George’s Anglican Grammar School.