The Coastal-Burwood Community Board member recently started her own business Jojahawa Ltd and launched a mobile app called Māori Word Find & Learn.
Zervos started creating Māori word finders about 30 years ago for her younger cousin who liked puzzles.
She has always had an interest in Māori language and remembers learning about it while travelling around New Zealand with her parents when she was young.
“I remember my parents saying maunga is mountain and nui is big and that’s why it’s called Mt Maunganui,” Zervos said.
“I thought that was cool. I’ve always liked how place names are made up with words that describe them.”
Zervos admits getting a bit “carried away” with the word finders, creating pages and pages before taking a break to have kids.
Soon after, she noticed learning te reo Māori was encouraged at her children’s kindergarten and decided to continue her word finds, only this time typing them out on the computer.
This was difficult as in the early 2000s, there weren’t many layouts to follow, meaning she had to type out each letter and space.
“It was quite a long process trying to get them all in line with each other,” she said.
“[Once] I started typing them out I thought, oh I could get them made into books.”
After a year of working away at the word finds in her spare time, Zervos ended up with three books containing more than 50 puzzles each.
She decided to try her luck with various publishing companies.
One of the companies told her it would trial books with 30 puzzles each, but they would need to be edited by someone fluent in te reo Māori.
“There was no way to look for people on the internet,” Zervos said.
“It was all phone and mail so it was quite tricky to actually access people the same way you can do now.”
She put the books on hold.
They sat in the cupboard for 20 years - until recently when she had the idea of turning them into downloadable puzzles for mobile devices.
Setting up the app proved difficult due to translation issues, but Zervos wanted to get her work out there as she’d put so much time and effort into it.
She hopes her app can help people to learn in a fun way and has been pleased with the feedback she’s received so far.
“I can see the total of how many people have played everyday,” she said. “It’s actually quite encouraging to see that number creeping up a wee bit.”
- Download the app at Google Play or the Apple App Store.
