Yoi: a language app for children of national minorities created in Ukraine

For primary school students from national minorities to study the Ukrainian language, a Yoi mobile application has been developed with the support of the Finnish Learning Together project.

This is stated in a statement on the website of the New Ukrainian School reform.

You can download the application for smartphones with іOS and Android.

The application should assist teachers in teaching and students in learning Ukrainian in educational institutions with languages ​​of instruction of national minorities. It can be used as an additional learning tool during lessons.

The application is available in Ukrainian, Romanian, and Hungarian. The main idea of ​​the application is to teach children in a playful format through real-life situations. This way, children will be ready to use the Ukrainian language in everyday life and education.

To do this, the application has two assistant characters, Lulu and Lolo. Virtual assistants read the task that the child has to perform on the smartphone screen, and the answer options are duplicated by images.

The application can be downloaded for free. To use it, you need to enter data on the region and class of the child for further formation of statistics. The application has two levels that must be passed sequentially, topic by topic.

The name of the application, YOI, is an exclamation in the Ukrainian language typical of the regions targeted by the program, Zakarpattia and Bukovyna. When creating the application, the developers conducted surveys in the communities of the Zakarpattia and Chernivtsi regions and took into account advice from children and parents.