This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4
What I Built
I'm from Hyderabad, India. My wife and I both grew up speaking Telugu — it's our mother tongue. We have two daughters, three and one and a half. They're at a daycare where the teachers cover English letters and rhymes, sometimes Hindi, but not Telugu. And here's the part that's harder to admit: my wife and I haven't read or written Telugu in any real way for years. We can speak it fluently, but we lost the script somewhere along the way. When I mentioned this to colleagues at work, several of them said the same thing about their own kids. This is what Maatru is for.
Maatru is a small app for parents like me who can't comfortably teach the script themselves. A kid taps Start and hears a Telugu letter spoken aloud. Four letter buttons appear on screen and they tap the one that matches the sound. After five letters the session ends and they see a "Great job" card. Later, a parent can open a separate dashboard — gated by a PIN — and read a short English paragraph about what their kid practiced that day, which letters they got right, and which ones they're still working on.
My first design had the kid write the letter on paper and photograph it; Gemma 4 would compare it to the target and give feedback. I tested that capability on Day 1 before building anything around it. The moment I knew was when Gemma 4 confidently misread అ — a clean, typed vowel on a white background — as completely different characters: ౦ on cloud, ని locally. It got 1 of 20 right on Gemma 4 E4B running locally and 4 of 20 on the 31B variant via OpenRouter — both models failed even on typed reference, which should have been the easy case. The vision capability wasn't there yet for Indic scripts, at least not reliably enough to be the foundation of a literacy tool.
