The Che'w Robot - The entry from Princeton High School, the New Jersey State Winner, is an interactive robot that is able to communicate in Mam, a Mayan language from the western highlands of Guatemala and Mexico that also forms one of the largest indigenous language-speaking communities in the United States due to migration. The prototypes that we have built, each named Che'w for the Mam word for star, is to encourage the use of these declining languages in schools, where dominant languages like Spanish and English often take over at the expense of wisdom and worldviews that existed prior to colonialism. With its conversational capabilities drawn from neural networks that are trained to understand words, sentences, and phrases from spoken and written language gathered in Princeton, Morristown, and the Guatemalan community of Cajolá, the artificial intelligence capabilities of Che'w are utilized when the robot is able to connect to a wireless network while a push-button series of programmed phrases, stories, and responses is accessible anywhere that the robot might be connected to a power source. …...more
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