Updated 9/16/2016 by Carl Cortright
tl;dr The Home with Arapaho project is a language restoration project started in 2015 with the goal of helping Arapaho youth learn their native language. It is an app that acts as a language aid, interacting with "wall cards" in the user's environment to allow users to learn how to pronounce words and phrases.
The Home with Arapaho project was started by an Arapaho linguist, Finn Thye, and two computer science students, myself and John Raesly, in 2015 with the goal of helping restore the Native American Language, Arapaho. For those who don't know, the Arapaho are a small, highly persecuted tribe of Native Americans living on a reservation in northern Wyoming. Their population of native speakers has been drastically decreasing as the youth fail to pick up the language in substantial numbers and the elderly who are fluent pass away. It has gotten to the point where there are less than 100 fluent speakers alive.
When we first started this project, we came in with the intention of just helping the Arapaho, and after some moderate success with our system, we decided to form a company around the idea; we would build our system in popular language that most Americans wanted to learn, and use the proceeds to help fund our language restoration efforts. A couple of months in, we decided to pivot significantly and just focus on becoming a profitable business. We did multiple trials with test users, won the newcomer of the year prize at the CU-Boulder new venture challenge and were accepted to the Catalyze CU accelerator program on the University of Colorado campus.
Our team at the NVC championships.
With seemingly great traction, we decide that it was time to move to the next level and start accepting pre-orders for our French and Spanish system. Work was hard, we discovered it was a lot harder to get people to pay money for something, but we continued to push forward. With only a few hundred dollars in pre-orders, we knew something was wrong, and hypothesized that although the system was useful, it wasn't something that everyday people wanted to pay for; we were too niche.
Rather than give up, after the summer ended, we worked to finish the system in Arapaho, and are currently working on grants to get it produced in full and deployed in Arapaho schools and homes. All of our code is open source, and we would appreciate any help from anyone who wants to contribute.
The Android app itself is a fairly simple QR code scanning app, so building is fairly simple.
- Install Android Studio
- Open the project folder
- Build and run the project
The next steps for the project are as follows:
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Create a web interface that allows users to record and upload their own sound files
- Add sound files to large database
- Generate a "wall card" for each sound file uploaded, printable via pdf
- Add sound file API to website that allows phones to grab a sound file they havent seen before
-
Implement the system in IOS using previous code base
- We have a decent code base for implementing the system for IOS, all we need now is developer time to modify the existing code to work for the Arapaho system
If you want to help, please contact either carl@carlcortright.me or piqueen@gmail.com