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Hi--I thought some people might be interested in something I found yesterday.

There's an annual competition (continent-wide, with a corresponding international event, too) called the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. (I apologize if this is old news--I did try the search function and didn't see it turn up earlier on the board here.) It's for high school students (though middle school students are welcome to participate, too), so my kids are too young to participate formally, but Harpo has had the most wonderful time this morning with some of the practice problems and last year's test.

(Hope this will be clickable; it doesn't always seem to work for me!):

www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/practice.php

There are similar problems available on a website from Princeton, too (there's a link to this from the naclo site if this one won't click):

http://webscript.princeton.edu/~ahesterb/puzzles.php

Basically, one looks at bits of an unknown written language, and deduces meaning/syntax/grammatical forms using clues provided. Harpo has had a fantastic time with these, and I thought other puzzle-y, pattern-y kids (and I know there are lots here) might enjoy them, too.

(I myself had a great time reading all about linguistics last night when I should have been in bed! What a fascinating field--all sorts of applications--computer science, anthropology, medicine, psychology, history, etc, etc.)

peace
minnie

sounds cool! ds was talking today about wanting to learn Japanese; he is into manga, 'go', and yu-gi-oh, and loves Japanese art (eg: Hokusai) so he figures he needs to learn Japanese.
I was thinking it could be fun for a guy who likes to learn and break codes and do puzzles, at least learning the characters/letters.
(We'll see how that goes, but in the meantime these links sounds fun )

These look cool! Thanks