Globe wants phone apps teaching Cebuano

GLOBE APP CHALLENGE. Michelle Tapia, head of the Education and Digital Learning (EDL) under Globe’s Corporate Strategy and Business Development Group, answers question during a press conference that launched the Globe’s App Challenge 2016 on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. With her are Rose Sagun (left), market development and advocacy manager of EDL and Cebu City librarian Rosario Chua (right).
(CDN PHOTO/LITO TECSON)

GLOBE Telecom urged local internet applications developers to mount mobile apps that will teach kids in Cebu how to read and write in Cebuano.

Michelle Tapia, head of Education and Digital Learning under Globe’s Corporate Strategy and Business Development Group, said this call was in line with the company’s education initiatives to come up with top quality content in under-served learning areas.

“The tri-lingual system is a key cause of basic reading comprehension. With poor reading skills, students are ill-equipped to learn other key subjects such as Math and Science,” she said during the launch of Globe’s App Challenge 2016 in Cebu City on Wednesday.

App Challenge Cebu 2016 is in support of the Department of Education’s Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), a program wherein the children’s mother tongue is used in the classroom from Kinder to Grade 3 as a bridge to learning Filipino and English.

Cognitive skills

The purpose of MTB-MLE is to develop appropriate cognitive and reasoning skills to enable children to operate equally in different languages, providing learners with a strong educational foundation.

Of the 18 Philippine languages identified by DepEd in the MTB-MLE, Cebuano is the second most-spoken in the country, after Tagalog, but is the language with the largest number of native speakers.

Tapia said the apps that will be developed are seen to address the lack of reading and learning materials in the native language, either in print and digital.

“At present, a lot of students have minimal-to-no usable material for in-classroom learning or for self-study especially for fundamental skills like mother tongue literacy in K-3, thus, while they are able to speak and understand their main language or dialect, their reading and writing abilities are limited,” she said.

She added that the apps will teach more than 500,000 Cebuano children their native alphabet and help them build their vocabulary through various activities, where learning concepts will focus on colors, numbers shapes, family members, and body parts.

Mechanics

The mobile app initiative will be piloted in Cebu but will be replicated in other regions if proven successful, said Tapia.

This year’s App Challenge, in partnership with Molave Development Foundation, is open to all Cebu-based developers and other provinces that speak Cebuano.

Rose Sagun, market development and advocacy manager, said interested parties need to form a group of three to four members with at least one member fluent in Cebuano.
Submission of proposals will be until Nov. 10, she said.

Five qualifiers will be announced on Nov. 11 and will be invited to attend a one-day online workshop via Brightspace on Nov. 14 where experts from Globe, Molave and IREX will participate to mentor qualifying teams.

Live Beta versions of the app must be 70 percent complete by the time it is presented on the face-to-face Pitch Day in December in Cebu.

Details of the App Challenge are posted on the Globe Labs’ Facebook page, said Sagun.