After six years in the making, Vaipunu Ian Tairea, a software developer, digital creator and educator in Mauke, has officially launched his custom-built digital platform, GalaxyMaps.

GalaxyMaps is an open source e-learning platform themed around space and galaxies, where learning pathways take the shape of explorable star constellations and is being used for remote teaching from Mauke.

“My dream is that we see it being used in all of the Cook Islands as well as other Pacific Island nations and Aotearoa, but it’s cool that we are building it here, and starting it here,” says Tairea.

“It’s quite rewarding to see something you have been building for such a long time finally in the hands of the people you’ve designed it for.”

Tairea is working with 27 students from Years 4-11 in Mauke and four students from Years 12 and 13 in Mangaia.

He is also working with Maraurau o te Pae Api’i/Ministry of Education, running a pilot programme with Apii Mauke and Apii Mangaia.

Tairea built GalaxyMaps, a digital platform for engaging and self-paced learning, while at 42 Silicon Valley Code School in California in 2019. He was motivated by the school’s focus on future-proof computer science training for the next generation of software engineers.

“I was impressed by this code school as there were hundreds of students from all around the world there, all learning how to code at a very high level, and yet there wasn’t a single teacher in the building,” he shares.

“All the learning was facilitated by their own technology platform and if you needed help, they literally said ‘Got a question? Ask your peer on the right. Otherwise, try your peer on the left.’

“Your reference guide is called Google/man/the Internet …”

At the time, Tairea was a digital technology teacher at Tai Wānanga Tū Toa, a Māori high school in Palmerston North.

Being in senior leadership, the Silicon Valley experience was “absolutely mind-blowing” for him in terms of challenging conventional ideas of teaching and learning.

Vaipunu Ian Tairea, a software developer, educator and voyager, in Mauke has officially launched his custom-built digital platform, GalaxyMaps. TE PUNA MARAMA/25030601

Tairea said the 42 code school platform also had a graph view of the learning steps that looked like connected nodes.

“At the time I thought to myself, ‘it would be cool if you could position the nodes to look like star constellations,’ and that seeded the idea of a sky full of star constellations, each a course of learning that students could explore and learn about anything they wanted.”

That was the premise of GalaxyMaps.

Tairea started building a prototype in between exercises at the 42 code school.

“We soon realised we had tapped into a metaphor that resonated with Māori and Pasifika peoples,” he said. “The idea of way-finders, mapping new domains for navigators to follow and explore.”

“In the GalaxyMaps platform, teachers are captains and students are navigators. Captains map out the steps of learning, these form galaxies with missions for the navigators to complete.

“This seemed like a far more interesting way to frame education and one that Māori and Pasifika students could relate to.”

It has been a long journey for Tairea, working on GalaxyMaps as a side project for years while he was teaching full-time in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In 2022, Tairea fulfilled another dream when he relocated to Mauke with his father, also named Vaipunu Tairea, to focus on GalaxyMaps full time.

While building GalaxyMaps, the challenges he faced included having to juggle the different roles required to develop an app and business while adapting to the demands of island life like the community working bees, cleaning lawns, looking after pigs, plantation and voyaging.

Securing pre-seed investment was tough, as was moving all their belongings from Aotearoa to Mauke.

“And the technical side is always a challenge, getting the code to do what you want it do to, and lots of finding and fixing of bugs in the code.”

He found joy in watching the students locked in and engaged in learning, or when a student called out to show him that they had completed another mission

Another exciting feature was watching students in Mangaia engage with the platform, learning through the web development galaxy.

“Watching their screens and assisting from Mauke was a big highlight for me since it felt like we really are pioneering new innovative models of learning all the way in the Pa Enua,” Tairea said.

“There’s something special about that. This is our vision for the future of education in the Pacific Islands, and we are just getting started.”

Tairea would like to acknowledge and thank his brother and co-founder Ben Tairea, his friend and senior developer Stefan Charsley, and another friend and pre-seed investor, Rich Bodo.

“Without these guys, we’d probably be waiting another six years,” Tairea said.