Bridging Roots is a learning tool to support teachers of indigenous languages. The program gamifies the learning process with games like matching games, crosswords, and Choose Your Own Adventure. Matching games involve matching a word in the indigenous language to a picture or its English equivalent. Crosswords are generated randomly from the words and their corresponding meanings already provided by the teacher. The choose your own adventure feature offers interactive stories with dialogues containing keywords in the indigenous languages. By hovering over a word, the English translation appears, and by clicking it, the pronunciation can be heard.

There is also a community dictionary feature, which allows community members to add words with pronunciations by adding an audio file. Additionally, there is also a community map/points of interest page where community members can add culturally significant places with the associated history/story.

The project began with a collaboration with the Mangilalauk School in Tuktoyaktuk to incorporate Inuvialuktun. This semester, the focus will be on integrating the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples, SENCOTEN, into the app by working with Bayside Middle School in Brentwood Bay. The key stakeholders in this initiative are the teachers and students of the indigenous languages (both in Mangilalauk and Bayside Middle School). Additionally, the INSPIRE team, developers, and Dr. Sonya Bird have been helping us by facilitating a connection to one of her master’s students, SEX̱SOX̱ELWET, who is the SENCOTEN teacher at Bayside Middle School.