GlotBot: Hybrid Language Translator for Secondary Level Mathematics Classrooms

Manooshree Patel, Swapneel Chalageri

Abstract: As the place where so many individuals make lifelong friends, learn how to navigate the world, and grow into themselves, compassion must start in the classroom. However, current American classrooms sometimes lack the very principles of equality and inclusion which underlie compassionate communities. One such case can be seen in the systemic lingual ostracization of students who are not native English speakers (English language learners). As our student design partners indicated, students’ and teachers’ mutual understanding despite differences in language, contributes to a feeling of “love and comfort in the classroom”. Inspired by our student design partners’ proposal of the Robo-Assistant, we decided to answer the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) 2023 research and design challenge with GlotBot! GlotBot is a mobile application to be used by teachers while delivering classroom instruction. GlotBot is designed for the secondary mathematics classroom, a prime setting in which students’ English language proficiencies are unfairly conflated with their mathematical abilities. GlotBot translanguages; it generates hybrid translations of teacher speech in real-time by translating non-technical terms into Spanish, but keeping technical terms (“coordinate plane”, “graph”) in English. The teacher can choose to repeat this hybrid translation out loud, to create more access points to the content for English language learners. The main objective of GlotBot is to assist teachers in delivering an equitable pedagogy to create an inclusive and compassionate classroom space that celebrates our nation’s lingual diversity.