NACLO is a high school Olympiad contest in linguistics and language technologies. Formulating contest problems is not straightforward because the contest does not have pre-requisites. Because students are not expected to know linguistics, specific languages, advanced math, or computer programming, the problems must be self-contained, and yet must still test the skills such as algorithmic thinking, abstractly representing a solution space, reducing a solution space, and evaluating a solution. These skills represent computational thinking, the part of computer science that does not involve computers. Some problems also introduce tools of linguistics and language technologies such as finite state machines and context free grammars. So more generally, this Small Grant for Exploratory research tackles the new problem of designing a curriculum of training sessions and contest problems that introduce high school students to computational thinking as it applies to the processng of human languages. The importance of the project is to inspire students to study linguistics and computer science and to increase participation and diversity in those fields.
