This year a group of 20 budding linguists came forward to take part in the competition.

The competition launched on Monday 17th November and 5 teams spent an initial lesson tackling a variety of language-themed challenges hosted on a virtual platform. These ranged from easy to difficult, and involved a good mix of different languages, and even some made-up languages! Pupils really enjoyed the variety of challenges and even learnt some basic parts of new languages such as Dutch or Thai in order to be able to complete them.

Our 5 teams worked really well, with the winning team completing almost all the challenges set.

Congratulations to the BGS winners, Team Magical Unicorn: Ethan Webb, Vivaan Bhardwaj, Seline Wong and Daniel Nwaekpe!

They placed 38th in the region and 149th in the country.

And well done to all those who took part, scoring some admirable scores and throwing themselves into the challenge. Aysu Batmaz, Lily Pigott-Denyer, Paige Cheung, ​Jessica Boghean, Lilo Mason, Esther Oyeleye, Phoebe Wisniewska, Arthur Barnard, Joel Oluro, Jotham Oluro,Sammy Wickens, Katie Murati, Oscar Vivian, Ben McCarthy, Jeremiah Hemeson and Freya Younis Jordan.

GCHQ NLC
What was it like?

Whilst participating in this year’s NLC, I will have to say that it took a lot of effort to even get started - just looking at the mountain of questions felt like an insurmountable task to surpass, especially considering the number of other teams we were competing against, not only in our local school, but in the entire region - and if that wasn’t enough, we were also competing against the nation! In all honesty, just gathering the motivation to begin was one of the hardest challenges there! But it didn’t take long until we genuinely began to enjoy it, started having fun as a group, spent many a lunch break and multiple hours after school dedicated to it!

This was an incredible experience that we will never forget. In the end, we spent 24 hours on this competition out of the 25 allotted to us. At this point, we were too far in to even consider slowing down. However, in the end, we didn't manage to complete all the challenges, but we completed around 92% of the challenges; not too bad if I do say so myself!

Our team placed 38th regionally and 149th nationally, which means we placed in the top 3% of the nation! Overall, this was a great experience that we will all remember for the rest of our time at BGS.

Quotes from members of Team Magical Unicorn (yes, that’s our team name)

"I quite enjoyed this competition. It had quite a good range of languages, but the made-up languages were a bit difficult. I also wish some hints were a bit more useful."
Seline Wong

"The challenge was very enjoyable and thought-provoking, challenged me and put my linguistic skills to the test."
Ethan Webb

"It was a really great experience, which gave way to competition. I only wish it wasn't quite so difficult."
Vivaan Bhardwaj

"A highly enjoyable experience and allowed me to truly test my code-breaking skills in a way that I haven’t been able to just yet. I could only wish that there were more made-up languages that didn’t require knowledge beforehand, and that we had more freedom in team names. “Magical Unicorns” was not our chosen team name; it was Team Rocket."

Daniel N, 9H - Team Magical Unicorns

Below are some examples of the types of challenges they completed if you want to have a go yourself at home.

And here is the Christmas Challenge for everyone which launched nationally on 10th December.

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