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In School
Alan Turing Cryptography
Competition 2013
Year 10 students Katie Bruce, Rianna Gurden and Alice
Thornton-White from team “Smiley Faces” have achieved
third place in the UK in the 2013 Alan Turing Cryptography
Competition, organised by the University of Manchester.
They won a trophy for the school, a certificate and a £20
Amazon voucher for each team member.
Eight other students received £10 each in Amazon
vouchers for solving Ch.5 and Ch. 6 in a competition first
in the UK:
“Synergy”team: Elsebine Bolier, Sakshi Soni, Joanna Chong
and Catrin Williams
“Spartacus” team: Matilda Crowfoot, Joe Thrush, Jasmine
Handford and Aydin Hepsaydir. The prizes have been
presented in a Year 10 assembly by Mr Lee.
Certificates were also awarded to the students, completing
all six chapters in the competition: Catrin Williams, Joanna
Chong, Sakshi Soni and Elsebine Bolier.
All the students greatly enjoyed participating in the
competition and are looking forward to an equally
successful event in 2014. Participation is open to all
students up to and including Year 11 in groups of no more
than 4.
Miss Watson
Languages Department
Linguistics Olympiad
For the majority of students participating, the Linguistics
Olympiad was an exciting opportunity to try our hand at a
subject which we had never really tackled before, and had
never really been aware of either. There was little to do in
the way of preparation, although a glance at a past paper
beforehand did little to calm anyone’s nerves, particularly
as at a length of 2 hours the test was longer than most of
my AS level exams.
Students participating were predominantly maths
and languages students as linguistics is a fascinating
combination of the two, and with questions involving
a range of languages from Bulgarian to the Phoenician
alphabet, a variety of skills were required. What was
really interesting about the test was the opportunity to
experience other languages we are not normally exposed
to, such as Bengali, and how some questions were about
how the languages sound and their characters and others
about their grammatical structures.
One thing the Linguistics Olympiad provided was the
opportunity to experience something beyond the
curriculum, and with one of the questions even involving
English grammar, there was also a chance to analyse our
own language in a way we do not have the opportunity to
in a normal school day.
Sometimeswhatwas reallydeductionanduseof linguistics
skills just felt a lot like guessing but with the significant
improvement of this year’s results from the last, it is safe to
say a group of very strong candidates participated in the
Olympiad this year, and hopefully the improvement will
continue in the future.
