Notes on running (optional) information sessions

1. A training session should be an hour and a half to three hours. Half of the time should be presentation and group problem solving. The other half should give the students some time to solve problems on their own. You can walk around and help them, and sum up a the end.
2. For your presentation: keep the students engaged by asking them a lot of questions. For example, "Raise your hand if anyone has ever told you not to say, 'Me and him went to the movies' " or "Raise your hand if you have ever used machine translation to do your Spanish homework." Ask a question every minute or two.
3. Your presentation should address these things: What is linguistics? What are language technologies and why is it not a solved problem? What is NACLO? Sample problems and solutions (get these from the web site) How to register for NACLO What is the schedule for the contest day? The invitational round and the international contest Examples of careers in linguistics, languages, and language technologies
4. Some points about what is and isn't in the contest: There is no pre-requisite knowledge of linguistics, math, or computer science. We are not testing what people already know about these topics. Rather, we are inspiring them to study these topics. The computational part of the contest is "computational thinking", which involves abstraction in how to represent a problem and algorithmic thinking about how to solve it.
5. Students do not need to know linguistic terminology. In a training session, if a student answers a question using words like "relative clause" and "nominative case". I say, "She just answered the question using the word X. But you don't need to know X. Can someone answer the question in a different way without using the word X."
6. It is important for students to know that 40% of the score for each problem is for the correct solution and 60% is for the explanation. So when you work through examples as a group, ask the students how they came to their answers and tell them that they will have to write that down.
7. This is for you to keep in mind, but not necessarily convey to the students: there are two goals of NACLO. We want to do a serious talent search, but we also want to increase the number of people in language-related careers by introducing them to linguistics before they get to college. (We also want to increase enrollment in our courses by telling high school students to plan ahead.) The problems are designed to give students a view of other languages and cultures. In the open round (Feb. 5) everyone can learn something and everyone can have fun, but there will be some harder problems that contribute to the talent search.