Who we are

Who We Are

Bridging the language gap, live.

What is MAMAKO's mission?

In international and bilingual schools across East Asia and beyond, students often understand the topic of a lesson and lose the lesson itself when academic English moves faster than they can. MAMAKO exists to close that gap during the lesson — so multilingual learners follow the class as it happens, get help with the words they didn't catch, and leave with a recap of the lesson. Language should never be the reason a student falls behind.

What does MAMAKO do?

Teachers start a live session and teach the way they always do. MAMAKO gives them:

Live captions on the classroom screen, floating over slides or filling the board
Hard words glossed as the teacher speaks, in simpler English or the class's home language
A live word wall of the lesson's key terms, and a class glossary students open by link
A lesson recap after class, written automatically and checked by the teacher before students see it

Teachers run MAMAKO on the projector for whole-class support, so students need no device during class. After class, students can read the recap on a phone, tablet or laptop.

MAMAKO transcribes English, so the teacher needs to teach in English. Glosses and vocabulary support are available in 13 languages, and captions can be translated into one language at a time in the teacher's browser. MAMAKO is built for English-medium classrooms.

Who is MAMAKO for?

MAMAKO works in any English-medium classroom with multilingual learners. The product is sharpest at the secondary level — where academic English starts to outpace what students can catch in real time.

What does MAMAKO mean?

MAMAKO means nothing in particular, and that's the point. The classrooms we built it for span eight or ten languages on any given day. A name in any one of them would have favored its speakers. We wanted a sound that belonged to none.

The swan is on purpose. Swans are often seen as figures of grace, attention, and quiet presence across many cultures. A good classroom feels a little like that. So, we borrowed the bird.

Who built MAMAKO?

Built from inside the classroom.

M.S.Ed in TESOL

Map of East Asia showing Tianjin, Seoul, and Hsinchu, cities where Logan Shaffer has lived and taught — Classrooms across East Asia

I'm Logan Shaffer , Head of English at TEDA International School, an EARCOS-member international school in Tianjin, China. Previously, I taught in Hsinchu, Taiwan and Seoul, Korea, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education with an M.S.Ed in TESOL.

I started MAMAKO because of a repeated moment: an EAL student stalls on a single word, the lesson keeps going, and the next twenty minutes of class are lost to them. My mission with MAMAKO is to make sure other teachers don't have to keep watching that happen.

I'm building MAMAKO while I'm teaching full-time, which means the product gets stress-tested in real classrooms before launching.

If you work at an international or bilingual school, I'd love to talk.

How can I find out more?

Have a question, a comment, or want to talk through how MAMAKO might fit your school? Send a message and we'll get back to you.