On Thursday, January 26, from 9 a.m.-12 p.m., language teacher Lori Pierce hosted the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) in Hooper auditorium. At least ten students from the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, and 2,500 others across the nation, were excused from class in order to participate.

This competition provided an opportunity for high school students to use problem solving skills to creatively decode languages, some of which are used everyday. “I thought it would be interesting to interpret a language without being able to translate it into English directly,” Haley Hsu, senior, said.

The competition was composed of eight types of “decoding” problems. One was a menu from a Vietnamese restaurant where students had to translate it into English without any hints. Another was a “made-up” language where participants had to combine different parts of the made-up language into an English sentence. These difficult problems each had their own problem-solving skills.

“It was definitely a lot more entertaining than I thought it would be. I had a lot of fun going through the contest. I definitely do not feel like I placed, but I definitely do feel like it was a pretty fun test to take. The skills you had to use were very similar to the problem-solving and logic skills you naturally develop growing up, especially if you’ve had to learn another language,” Hsu said.

Results come out early March, the second round is on March 10 and only the top 10% of competitors are invited back for the second round. The competition in March is four hours long, but if participants score well in the second round, they can qualify to compete in Ireland and represent the U.S. in the final competition. Only one student is expected to qualify for the second round.