CANBERRA: An Indian-Australian couple has developed a mobile app to teach Hindi language to their kids. Launched in early - August, RBhasha was made after months of research and development. Jayant Prasad and Puja Sahay, parents to two boys- a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, speak Hindi amongst themselves. However, their children speak English.
“We speak in Hindi at home. We talk to them in Hindi, but their replies are always in English,” Jayant said. Like true migrant parents, the two wished for their kids to learn the language in Australia. “Kids are so good with gadgets these days and spend so much time on touch-screens. We saw that there were numerous apps to learn and write 'ABC' and basic English but there wasn't much for learning Hindi to kids. So we thought of developing an app ourselves,” Jayant said.
He had arrived in the country as an international student to study Business Administration at Melbourne business school, over a decade ago. He married Sahay while in school, and later they moved to Canberra in 2006. Both of them belong to IT backgrounds and were aware about the basics of app-making. However, their biggest challenge was to make an app that kids would enjoy.
“We needed to include animation to make it interesting for kids. We finally found someone who was not only good at animation, but also was from the field of education. And that is how we set off to develop this app,” Puja said. Both the parents gave their weekends to creating the app, for seven months. They even got creative inputs from their sons Soham and Shubh. “My sons would tell us, 'Mumma, there needs to be a badge for this achievement'. So we have taken lots of inputs from our own kids while developing the app,” Puja said,
After launching RBhasha on August 2, Puja said they received a positive response. Our kids go to Canberra Hindi School and we also showed them a demo. We are happy the kids like it,” she said.
