Code-cracking Perse pupils triumph in National Language Competition
A group of Perse Year 9 pupils have come out on top among a field of more than 3,000 teams to win the prestigious National Language Competition (NLC).
The Wacky Blue Robin team, featuring Kiana Mackie, Hanrong Zeng, Ryan Stubbs and Roy Han, triumphed in the linguistics-based code cracking competition, organised by GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence, cyber and security agency.
Teams could choose which questions they wanted to tackle in the online event, held over the course of a week, accumulating points for correctly solving puzzles based around largely rare and even made-up languages.
As such, no previous language skills were required, but it was a tremendous feat from the Wacky Blue Robin team, who have been invited to visit GCHQ’s Cheltenham offices to collect the champions’ trophy from the agency’s director Sir Jeremy Fleming next month.
The Perse was also represented in the NLC by four other Year 9 teams, who finished seventh, 15th, 29th and 57th respectively.
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