The Oxford German Olympiad 2020 launched on 26 September 2019, the European Day of Languages! The topic is NATUR UND TECHNIK (Nature and Technology). There are tasks for learners of German in Year 5 to Year 13, tasks for group entries, and even some tasks for complete beginners.  The deadline for entries is noon on Friday 13 March 2020. You can find the full competition and submission guidelines here. Read on to see an outline of this year’s tasks…

Years 5 and 6 (age 9-11):

• Design a robot and label its parts, and write what it can do.
• Draw a picture of your home city, town or village from a Vogelperspektive – bird’s eye view. Label the things the bird is most interested in.
• You’re going to set up a community on Mars – draw your spaceship and the fifteen most important things to take, and label them.

Years 7 to 9 (age 11-14):

• Create a poster explaining Klimawandel.
• Find out about Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman. What technical invention would he choose to take back to his community if he could time-travel? Draw Ötzi with a speech bubble explaining his choice, and illustrate and describe the invention.
• Create a blogpost on a topic of your choice, with 3-5 photos taken by yourself, for a German-language online conservation magazine.

Years 10 and 11 (age 14-16):

• “Ein Tag ohne Technik” – Write a story or create a video or website on this theme.
• Paint or draw a landscape in the style of Caspar David Friedrich and write about the work of art that inspired it.
• “Machen wir unsere Erde unbewohnbar?” Write a dialogue between two people who disagree about the answer.

Years 12 and 13 (age 16-18):

• “Klimawandel – was können Jugendliche tun?” Plan a conference for 16-18 year olds including the advertisement and programme with keynote lectures and topics for roundtable discussion.
• “Vorsprung durch Technik – Rückschritt für die Natur?” Write a blogpost or create a video with this title.
• Record yourself giving a presentation on “Fahrerloser Verkehr – Utopie oder künftige Wirklichkeit?” or “Techno-Pop – Typisch deutsch?” .

Open Competition for Groups or Classes (4+ participants)

• Create a film or PowerPoint presentation with the title “Amazonas in Gefahr”.
• Write and illustrate a short book for children about a migrating bird.
• “Ein Roboter in der Schule!” – Create a video or song about a robot designed for helping with practical tasks in your school.

Discover German – Taster Competition (1-3 participants with no prior experience of studying German)

• Years 7 to 9: Find 10 inventions from German-speaking countries and the German word for each invention. Film yourself saying the German and the English word for each of your 10 examples.
• Years 10 and 11: Rewrite (in English) the Grimm Brothers’ story of “The Frog Prince” (Der Froschkönig) with the title “The Robot Prince”, setting it in a real modern German-speaking city and including 15 German compound nouns (like Frosch+König).
• Years 12 and 13: Write a blogpost on the topic “Will machine translation make human translators obsolete?” and support your argument with examples from German.