Researchers at the Meraka Institute of the CSIR have released a spelling game in all 11 official South African languages. The game, OpenSpell, can be adapted for additional languages.
OpenSpell is the inspiration of visiting American researcher and linguist, Dr Madelaine Plauché, who has been working in the human language technologies (HLT) research group. "Although computers are made available in rural areas and small community centres worldwide, it has become apparent that almost no local language software exists," she points out. This was poignantly brought home to her during a visit to India, where she watched a child patiently copying text for hours, without access to localised software to encourage learning.
Plauché was responsible for the design and content list, and utilised the expertise of her colleagues in the HLT group for programming, multimedia and diarisation (cleaning out noise from recordings), and in setting up consultations with ten primary school educators in Gauteng to identify the first words in each language. Recordings of letters were made using the voice talents of staff from around the CSIR.
Version V1.00 of OpenSpell is available for downloading and comprises two parts: a simple interactive computer-based activity that can be set at three levels (easy, medium and hard) and an editor that allows a tutor to edit the keyboard and record sounds. "Anyone can use the software to customise it to a language or dialect," Plauché explains. Feedback to learners is in the form of 'fun' rewards or penalties.
The software has been released under a Gnu General Public License (GPL). GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong 'copyleft' licence that requires derived works to be available under the same 'copyleft'. 'Copyleft' is a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others, and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.
Plauché is delighted to see this project come to fruition in South Africa, "I see it as a valuable tool in working towards an equitable spread of software support for non-dominant languages." The tool may also be incorporated by educators to help learners with regular spelling tasks.
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