Glenties students ‘crack the code’ at DCU All-Ireland Final

Two students from St Columba’s Comprehensive School achieved success at the National Final of the All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad.

Siún Ibbsand and Maria McLoone were the only students to represent Donegal out of one hundred qualifiers from over forty schools nationwide at the All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad held at Dublin City University.

The results are now in and Maria will be awarded a gold medal for coming fourth in the Junior individual competition – and thirteenth overall, on her first All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad Final.

This was Siún’s second trip to the All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad Final, having also qualified last year. This year she improved her ranking in the individual round, with a top fifty finish and her team finished fifth out of twenty-six teams in the team competition.

The girls participated in the gruelling individual event in the morning, testing their problem-solving skills over two and a half hours against the world’s toughest puzzles in logic, language and linguistics. In the afternoon they joined with students from other schools and participated in the two-hour team competition.

Run by the ADAPT Centre and supported by Science Foundation Ireland, the All-Ireland Linguistics Olympiad contest challenges students to engage in ‘code-breaking’ by applying logic, patience, and reasoning skills to solve complex puzzles in unfamiliar languages. It is a key element of the nationwide Problem-Solving Initiative.