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akaltyele-anthetyeke-awetyeke (2021)
game / exploration / translation

collaboration with Veronica Perrule Dobson, Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, Joel Perrule Liddle, Graham Wilfred Jnr Yining Shi and the Year 10 Arrernte class at Centralian Senior College - Delisha Malthouse, Megan Baliva, Agnes Saunders, Tanisha Davis, Alana Abbott, Amarlie Briscoe, Siobhan Breaden, Jeremiah Daniels-Pepperill, Tracyn Forrester, Kyle Maidment, Thomas Tambling, Bricarny Forrester, Miru Forrester, Emmanisha Nelson, Ella Fitz, Kaleel Ross, Lilly Mentha with David Moore and Jannette McCormack.

Full team here.

Kwene-akerle atnanpintyeme describes a kind of downwards motion in Eastern and Central Arrernte, the language of Mparntwe in the central desert of Australia.

It is the name of a prototype for a voice-activated computer game, designed and made with p5 and ml5 by a group of 16 year-old students at Arrernte class at Centralian Senior School in Mparntwe as part of our 2021 Processing Foundation Fellowship. 
 
​In it, atnengkwe (emoji animals) fall from the sky. To save them, you must say and pronounce their names correctly by the time they reach the ground. (A kind of like an Arrernte Space Invaders.) It’s a fun way to learn their names and practice your Arrernte. 

These students are future language leaders. The program at Centralian Senior College is all about building pathways, showing young people that their language is something that can lead to job opportunities as well. The students come together four times each week from different schools around Mparntwe and many speak multiple languages like Eastern and Central Arrernte, Western Arrarnta, Pitjantjatjara and Anmatyerr.

The game formed part of a broader program caled Akaltyele anthetyeke awetyeke mearning 'to teach to listen', that ran over ten weeks of workshops. The students explored concepts of artificial intelligence and data, building a spoken audio dataset of Arrernte words using Teachable Machine, training the computer to recognise Arrernte and designing the game. They also translated key terminology into Easter and Central Arrernte with Veronica Perrule Dobson, Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, Joel Perrule Liddle. There are of course, no direct translations for them. 'Akurrknge alharrkentye' the term of computer, translates as ‘lightning brain’ for example. 

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