Idea and background
A bridge joins two banks, and neither bank is given up. The first language is the scaffold; German is the destination.
Your child understands maths — and then stops at the word problem. What stops there is usually not the arithmetic but the German of the classroom. MatheBrücke is built to keep those two apart: the mathematics, and the language in which it is being asked for.
„Ich verstehe die Aufgabe nicht.“
“I don’t understand the task.”
A sentence that really occurs in the practice material of this tool — a sentence children need at school, and one they hardly ever say out loud.
Brücke is the German word for “bridge”, and here it is not decoration: it is the design. A bridge joins two banks without replacing either of them. It spans a gap, and it does not pretend that the gap is not there.
That is where the pedagogical decision of this tool sits. The first language stays the scaffold, German stays the goal — and both keep standing. Treat the first language as a way station to be left behind as quickly as possible, and the child loses the ground they calculate on. Avoid the language of the school instead, and the child stands alone in front of the task that school will measure them by. MatheBrücke keeps both banks in view: the language in which a child already understands mathematics, and the language in which they have to show it.
There is nothing to give up, then, and nothing to hurry. A child who can say what is being asked in their own language has understood the mathematics. What is still missing is one more way of saying it — and that is a language task, not a maths task.
A child who does not understand the German instruction is not a child who does not understand the mathematics. A wrong answer is not evidence of a defect; it is information about where the path was interrupted. Fold language and arithmetic into one score, and what you are measuring is the child’s language history — while the label on it reads “maths”.
Concepts are most reliably checked in the language in which they were built. So after a wrong answer, the same task is put again in the child’s own language. If it works there, the obstacle was the language; if it does not work there either, the obstacle is the concept. German stands next to that, not instead of it.
No account, no login, no tracking, no cookies, no analytics. Progress and settings stay in the browser of that one device (localStorage, key mathebruecke_v2) and never leave it. What this tool examines is not the child but the task: at which point did it become out of reach? That is the question it asks.
The three principles settle a few things by themselves. None of them is modesty; each is there for accuracy.
In a test, every wrong answer gets the same mark. Inside that mark, though, two very different things can be hiding: the instruction did not reach the child, or the concept is not yet there. Which of the two it was changes what helps next — and it changes what you say to your child tonight.
The centre of MatheBrücke is one small mechanism: after a wrong answer, the same task is asked again in the child’s own language. Same mathematical core, same answer, different wording. Alongside it, the German instruction can also be read together with a native-language explanation, so the two versions sit next to each other instead of being two separate texts.
The reading is simple:
Available — six languages
de-DE, ja-JP, en-US, tr-TR, uk-UA, ar-SA). If a recording does not exist yet, it is created once through Microsoft Azure’s speech service (Germany West Central region, EU) and stored; only the task text is transmitted — no personal data, no learning record. If neither is available, the device’s own speech synthesis (Web Speech API) reads the task.You do not have to translate the whole homework. In fact, that is the part that wears people out first. It works better to sit next to your child, open the screen, and first make sure in your own language what the task is asking for — then look at the German instruction. Press the read-aloud button and the German is spoken as it stands. When your child gets stuck on a word, say the same thing once in your own language first. If the same idea can be said in your language, nothing about the maths has been lost that day. Fifteen minutes is enough, and the record is kept on the device. Next time you open it, it is still there.
This section is here so that nobody leans on the tool harder than it can carry.
Automated checks run before every release. Does the app start up? Is every language version complete? Does every part of the screen actually get drawn? Do the tasks and their answers hold together? Are any question texts missing? Those checks have to pass one by one, and then the published address is opened and measured as well. A result that only exists on one computer does not count as proof.
Native-speaker review has not yet taken place. For the five translated languages — Japanese, English, Turkish, Ukrainian and Arabic — no one who speaks the language as a first language has yet read through the material and corrected it. Automated checks catch some things and cannot catch others: they cannot tell whether a sentence sounds natural to a child. That is the weakest point of the tool at the moment, and naming it is better than leaving it unsaid.
Native speakers are invited to take part. If you speak one of these languages at home, you do not have to review an entire language version. Five sentences that struck you as odd are already useful, and they will be built into the next release. What helps most is precisely what only a parent can report: my child stopped at this German sentence although the maths was no problem.
The program code is under the MIT licence. The translations and the explanations are under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution—ShareAlike 4.0 International). Both may be used freely in schools and in support settings, provided the origin is named and the same licence is kept.
MatheBrücke is a private, non-commercial project of an individual developer. No organisation is named as its provider — it is not a company and not a registered association. The details of who is responsible, how to make contact and how data is handled are collected in the imprint and privacy notice. As for the app itself: there is no account, no login, no tracking, no cookies, no analytics. Progress and settings remain on your own device (localStorage, key mathebruecke_v2) and are never transmitted. There is one honest exception, and it applies only if you write to us: the contact form in the imprint sends its entries through Formspree (USA).
The German version, about.html, describes the method, the quality assurance and the handling of data in detail. This English page has stayed within what a family can read.