Mo chéad hackathon Gaeilge 💻

Mo chéad hackathon Gaeilge 💻

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On Saturday, David Shawe 🕊️ and I took part in Craicathon at Dogpatch Labs, Baile Átha Cliath/Dublin. It was a chance to meet with other engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, artists, musicians and Irish language speakers to build projects that promote the Irish language and culture (all in a single day). 🎻🪗

After 5 hours of spraoi, we shipped Cupán Focail. Translating to “a cup of words”, the name is a play on “cúpla focal”, a phrase usually used to express you have a little Irish.

Cupán Focail encourages users to step out of the classroom/ the land of language learning owls🦉to learn and use Irish in real life. The app focused on coffee shops and removing the friction from initiating a friendly conversation in Irish. Users can find coffee shops willing to welcome customers who wish to order in Irish via the discovery map. Cupán Focail supports customers and baristas wishing to learn or revise all the phrases and vocabulary they will need complete an order in Irish. We even ran a fun experiment of introducing a loyalty card style system that rewarded users each time they placed an order using Irish.

It was a fantastic day. We got to play around with collaboration, rapid prototyping, code, AI, NFC tags, UX research, designing, hosting, presentation skills and even a mini sticker printer. All of this while being immersed in Gaeilge. Grateful of the chance to cleachtadh. 💕

🙏GRMA to Craicathon and the encouragement and guidance from Niall Larkin (and George), Daithí de Buitléir, Katelyn Davis and all of the Gaeilgeoirí and techies we spoke too. Shout out to Gaeltacht Type who kindly let us use ther gorgeous open source clo gaelach font, “Anois”. Míle buíochas to mo chairde agus mo mhúinteoirí who completed the questionnaires ar an Satharn and cheered us on from the group chat.

Keep your eye out for Cupán Focail ☕️👀