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We (an elementary teacher and a computer scientist) are helping migrant children without any knowledge of the german language to learn it easily and give elemen

We (an elementary teacher and a computer scientist) are helping migrant children without any knowledge of the german language to learn it easily and give elementary teachers much more time and improve the quality of their lessons dramaticaly with a desktop application for learning the german language and various perfect fitting supplementary materials. Often, german elementary teachers are facing the following situation: Consider a typical class of children with only a half of them capable to understand german. The teacher then constantly switches between those two groups trying to help each child as good as he/she can. That can be very frustrating because the teacher simply does not have the time to help each child as it needs (because the non-german speaking children often really need a 1:1 care to learn efficient). The other half, the german-speaking children, will quickly come short as well. So we developed a learning software which is so simple that every child can start learning with it instantly. The problem we are solving with it: The non-german children are now able to learn for themselfs without the need to ask the teacher while having great fun and much better progress than before! Once they are at a level where they unterstand the basic german words, they can follow the lessons much better which results in much higher quality of the lessons for them and beeing able to learn even quicker each time. As our small two person team consists of a elementary teacher who is working every day with those children (and is therefore constantly improving our products as she's using it in her own class) we know exactly what those teachers want for their children and what is giving the best results and motivation for them to learn german! It is a great joy to help all those children - it does not make big numbers in terms of revenue but it will enough for a living shortly. That's more we ever dreamed of as we started nearly six years ago :-) https://www.ma-lernsoftware.de https://www.ma-lernsoftware.de

hogrider 5y ago
Pardon my ignorance but isn't it a huge mistake to place non german speaking children in these classes? They just hope they'll pick it up along the way? Isn't it throwing them to the wolves?
- em-bee 5y ago
  there aren't really many other options. having separate schools for migrants would make it difficult for the children to integrate into the local society, but integration is seen as critical for everyone to get along. immersion into the target language environment is also the most effective way for kids to learn a new language. they will make friends with native speakers, and that will only help their language learning. in elementary school there is also less focus on academic performance
  - c_ma_gee 5y ago
    That's right. In germany all children (no matter of their origins) have to go into the same class. That has been discussed controversial but that's the decision of the government. Once, there were so called "Welcome classes" where all immigrants were in for the first several weeks to get the basics very quick (which worked very good in our opinion by the way). But then the government decided that this is not good and started to tell all schools to integrate them from the start (which then leads to the massive language-problems we try to solve). But for integrating those children into the community it is probably not that bad.

hogrider 5y ago

Pardon my ignorance but isn't it a huge mistake to place non german speaking children in these classes? They just hope they'll pick it up along the way? Isn't it throwing them to the wolves?

em-bee 5y ago
there aren't really many other options. having separate schools for migrants would make it difficult for the children to integrate into the local society, but integration is seen as critical for everyone to get along. immersion into the target language environment is also the most effective way for kids to learn a new language. they will make friends with native speakers, and that will only help their language learning. in elementary school there is also less focus on academic performance
- c_ma_gee 5y ago
  That's right. In germany all children (no matter of their origins) have to go into the same class. That has been discussed controversial but that's the decision of the government. Once, there were so called "Welcome classes" where all immigrants were in for the first several weeks to get the basics very quick (which worked very good in our opinion by the way). But then the government decided that this is not good and started to tell all schools to integrate them from the start (which then leads to the massive language-problems we try to solve). But for integrating those children into the community it is probably not that bad.