As humans, we learn to communicate information in various ways, including visual and verbal means. Of all the ways by which ideas and thoughts can be transmitted among humans, words- spoken and written -are without doubt, the most prominent. By them, wars have been started, ended, won and lost, relationships have been formed, fostered and fractured, and the world has marched on in the direction that we find it is going today.
Perhaps you wouldn’t associate Teseem, an app designed to help toddlers learn new words, with the things described above. But the tool, built by the startup Lizzie’s Creations, could set kids on the path to great things. It introduces them to the gift of language and does so in a fun and exciting way- just the way they like it.
Teseem-First Words is an educational application launched by Lizzie’s Creations to help babies, preschoolers and toddlers learn the basic words in English and local languages as well. The app gives children the opportunity to latch on to various languages and set-off on the path to becoming multi-lingual adults. It comes with engaging animation and child-friendly graphics, as well as a reservoir of words from the English, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages.
Elizabeth Kperrun, founder of Lizzy’s Creation, says that the app is meant to contribute to the early development of a sense of culture in children. In an interview with Disrupt Africa, she promised that the app’s contents would be continuously updated to include more words and languages. The long-term plan, she said, was to make it a pan-African app which aids the learning of indigenous languages on the continent.
Teseem lets its users learn colours, numbers, body parts, and more, through play; they are able to activate engaging animation by touching the screen of their device.
Kperrun says she expects the app to have about 100,000 downloads in the next few months; according to her, the excited response from the public thus far has shown that there was a widespread appreciation for “quality entertaining content for kids in African languages”.
Teseem-First Words is available for Android and iOS, and can be downloaded for free.