A'ayuda

Key Features

• Addresses shortage of Chamorro language teachers in schools
• Provides accurate language information to prevent online misinformation
• Won the Congressional App Challenge 2021

The Story

We remember as a middle school student, making a sentence in a Chamorro to be really difficult, because the only resources that non-speakers got were a couple dictionaries that we could only use in the classroom and sometimes, we had to look up some words online, and most of them were inaccurate or misleading. Now that we have matured, we think this will be a big problem for the students, because classes and local libraries are already experiencing shortages of these dictionaries, there are very few teachers in the school system teaching the language, and sometimes students are fed with misinformation online. Instead, we could use a dedicated space, driven by the community, to help the next cycle of students to learn about the language.