A start-up company helping people learn different languages is the winner of the 2022 University of Hawai’i Venture Competition (UHVC). GOALL (Great Online Activities for Language Learning), led by University of Hawai’i at Mānoa PhD students, won a prize package of more than $34,000.
GOALL provides a web and mobile app to help adult language learners achieve their goals through customizable and research-grounded task-based activities. Its prize package includes $10,000 from title sponsors Hawaiian Electric Industries (HEI) and Hawaiian Electric and more than $24,000 in in-kind prizes. Team members are Ann Choe, Kristen Urada, Yang Liu, and Susanne DeVore, who are all PhD students in UH Mānoa’s Department of Second Language Studies in the College of Arts, Languages, and Letters.
“We are very honored to receive first place,” said Choe, GOALL’s team leader. “The whole experience was a fantastic opportunity to develop our entrepreneurial knowledge and skills. We’re grateful for PACE, our coach Jeff Hui, and those who supported GOALL all along. We can’t wait to advance GOALL to its next step.”
UHVC is hosted annually by PACE in UH Mānoa’s Shidler College of Business to support budding entrepreneurs by providing hands-on education, mentorship, and resources to students from the ten-campus UH System who wish to start new businesses.
The third-place winner was the Ōfaga Leo Preschool System, which provides immersion language education in Hawai’i and the continental US in areas where there is a high demand for childcare and preschool services in the Samoan language.
The third-place prize totaled more than $10,000, including a $2,500 cash prize sponsored by HiBEAM in honor of pioneer Billy Richardson. Team members are John Patu Jr., a PhD student in Hawaiian and Indigenous language and culture revitalization at UH Hilo, and Carmelita T. Patu, a creative media student at Windward Community College.
https://pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/uhvc
