Before Ray Lennon, chief developer of Matooke, moved to Uganda last summer, he was excited to learn about the regional langauges that he would soon hear. To his surprise, despite the tens of millions of people who speak Luganda - lingua franca of central Uganda - the internet had virtually nothing to offer in terms of educational content.

It's clear that there's a division in accessibility when it comes to language learning materials for underserved regions of the globe - in particular the global south. In an era where the internet has the potential to make us more connected and informed, Matooke aims to focus the power of big data to enable anyone - no matter where they're from or what they speak - to communicate with the world.

Matooke is built on a Node.JS framework, and hosted using Heroku. The front-end is entirely vanilla HTML5, while the 3D graphics were implemented with the popular THREE.JS library.

Across the 7000+ languages in the world, it's an enormous challenge to aggregate data sources for all of them. Matooke's original goal was to teach introductory phrases, scraped from the internet, in every language and dialect. Due to the monumental hurdles associated with this task, we're first focusing on providing exposure to these langauges using an interactive tree explorer, which is flexible for future additions.

Our team is proud to have developed so much in such a short time span - especially considering that we began work at ~9:30PM on Saturday.

Matooke has the power to help connect a lot of people. We aim to approach language learning from new angles and continue our data-driven approach to democratizing human knowledge and serving the underserved.