Students top the world in contest
Language wins put Kerikeri High School on top of the world – virtually
Two Kerikeri High School students have topped the world in the first international virtual reality language competition. Gillian Toala, 16, didn’t just beat 10,000 students in six countries to win the top prize in the ImmerseMe Games, she also won first place for Greek, a language she’d never studied before, and Spanish.
Another Year 12 Kerikeri High student, Nimish Singh, also 16, placed second worldwide and took out the prize for Mandarin Chinese.
The competition was based around virtual reality language learning software developed by Kiwi company ImmerseMe.
Competitors were dropped into a series of pre-recorded virtual reality situations in which they had to test their language skills with real native speakers, for example by ordering a baguette in a Parisian boulangerie, visiting the Great Wall of China or booking into a hotel in Indonesia.
The competition ran from May 21 to 28.
ImmerseMe co-founder Scott Cardwell, who presented the awards at the school on Wednesday, said it was the world’s first virtual language learning competition.
“To have the two winning students from one school is a pretty huge achievement.”
Originally the competition was to have been held during the Tokyo Olympics but it was brought forward to give students a challenge during the Covid-19 lockdown.
The competition between Gillian and Nimish was so intense their eighthour-a-day efforts crashed the company’s servers.
“We had senior developers around the world furiously trying to work out a way to get the server back up. Then they completely crashed it in the last four hours of the competition.”
Gillian studies Spanish at school and is fluent in Samoan, which she said helped her learn other languages.
“It was awesome being able to practise different languages and feel like I was in the country in real life and real time.”
Nimish also takes Spanish at school and learns French and Chinese in his free time.
“I absolutely love learning languages. Language is the door to culture and ImmerseMe is the key.”
Both are heading to Spain on a school trip next year. They were to have gone in April but it was postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The software offers Chinese, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and English as a second language.