Romani Language Skills into STEM Skills for Women

Women in some cultures are at a disadvantage for learning STEM subjects. The Romani language is spoken by the Romani people across a diverse set of locations in Europe and elsewhere. The community is sometimes referred to in films and novels as the Gypsy community, but the formal name of the community is Romani.

The proposed solution is allowing what is called valence in the Romani language to be a resource for learning STEM courses. This would be taught in a free, online course for those who speak Romani in different parts of the world. The knowledge of the language becomes a learning tool as shown below:

  Romani makes use of what is called valency which can increase by means of markers such as -av-, -ar-, and -ker and decrease by means of markers -jov- and -áv-. The describe what exactly linguistic valency is is beyond the scope of this presentation. In general, Romani valence is how words bind to other words. Valency in linguistics is derived or inspired from valency in chemistry, which a measure of an atom's combining power. As can be seen, to explain Romani to Romani speakers allows for an analogy to chemistry. In the present time, valence is also the word used in the world of Big Data for how interconnected the data is.

  What is inspiring is the ability for this application in linguistics to be applied to the learning of mathematics and science oriented courses.

Mathematics

The number of edges at the vertex in a graph is the valence. There is essentially an analogy to valency as found in Romani, which is arity, which is also found in logic and computer science as well. To define arity for a general audience is beyond the scope of this presentation. However, to demonstrate the types of equations arity can produce, what could be called the valence of multiple variables could presented as:

The function f(x) =  6x Unary Function

               f(x,y) =  6xy Binary Function

In valency as found in languages like Romani, instead of unary and binary there is monovalent and divalent as shown as follows:

               She laughs Monovalent

     She gave the gift Divalent 

An analogy can be found with the following:

       The sun shines  Monovalent

                         6!  Analogy of Monovalent: Action flows from number

As can be seen, analogies to Romani can be used to teach introductory material for mathematics, computer science, and even logic.

 The final part of the free online course is the presentation of valance and Big Data. With large sets of data, valence is the measurement of the connectedness of parts of the data. A good example of this application of valence could be social media, where large sets of data are actually connected by means of individuals and businesses having social media connections to other individuals and businesses.

The solution focuses on women in the Romani community as way to assist in learning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses by means of the Romani language being a learning resource.

The idea is rather innovative.

There is an existing online course for this proposed solution.

It could really help the Romani community.

The team lead is not presently connected to the community in which the project is based.

I learned of Solve after taking an online course at MIT Professional Development.

It makes use of the valency found in the Romanian language as a learning tool.

The impact goal in the next year to five years is academic success in STEM courses from women who took this online course.

The measurement of progress would be the how students who took the free online course succeed in STEM courses.

The expectation is that by means of using what people in one community are already familiar with, the Romani language, participants can use components of their language as a learning tool for science and engineering courses as well as related topics.

The core technologies that would be involved would be computer science and Big Data by means of an innovative way for teaching these technologies.

1

Less than one year

The free online course promotes diversity by the very nature of the course.

The goal for the free online course is that future funding could be from grants. The operating cost is very small.

The goal would be for financial grants to establish financial sustainability.