Wolof Bot Api | Winner Facebook DevCircles Oakland Messenger Bot 2017 Hackathon
This API powers the Xamxam Facebook Messenger Bot.
A Facebook Messenger bot built during The DevCircles Oakland Hackathon 2017, to help
Wolof speakers learn Computer Science terminology in their own native language and in English.
We built this entire backend API ourselves this past Saturday to win the Hackathon.
Our tech stack is:
“Xamxam” in Sénégalese Wolof means “Knowledge” and “Xam” means “To know”. For over 3 years
now we’ve been thinking about how would a non-english speaker go about learning Software Engineering? I’ve even tried making my own Programming Language based on Wolof, my native West African language.
More than 80% of the world knowledge is in English and that number is even higher when you investigate
the Software Development world.
Our goal with this Xamxam Bot is to help bridge that gap, starting with Wolof speakers. We’ve built a Messenger Bot API from
the ground up to help teach learners about Computer Science terminology in both Wolof and English. You can ask it questions formulated
in either language and it will reply back with an answer in both languages. This implicitly helps learners with their english, while discovering
Computer Science.
I’ve even started a Facebook Page, which now has almost 600 members to help promote the Wolof language: “The Wolof Language Foundation (WLF) is a non-profit linguistics trade association chartered to promote, protect and advance written and spoken Wolof.”
This is not a documentation Bot. We have a higher purpose for it as our aim to help teach Full Software Engineering to non-english speakers via the Messenger Platform. Xamxam is not a one off project. We plan on working on it Full Time to make it an improved and usable product.