The Georgia Institute of Technology proposes a project - called Accessible Robotic Programming for Students with Disabilities (ARoPability) - to investigate the use of alternative interface modalities in engaging middle and high school students with disabilities in robotics-based programming activities. ARoPability will leverage support from the Center for the Visually Impaired, the National Federation of the Blind of Georgia, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, WizKidz Science and Technology Center, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It will (1) create alternative programming tools and use them in developing accessible modules for students with visual or physical impairments, (2) run Robotic Institutes at the Center for the Visually Impaired and with the National Federation of the Blind to evaluate the modules' ability to engage students with visual impairments, (3) run Robotic Institutes in conjunction with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to evaluate the modules ability to engage students with physical impairments, and (4) provide teacher training kits and documentation for classroom use. The work will focus on questions such as: What characteristics of robotics-based activities need to be transformed to engage students with visual impairments? What technologies can be adapted to enable achievement of robotics-based programming activities for students with physical impairments? Are there existing teaching modalities already employed by educators that can be used to train these new computing professionals? What methods can be exploited to broaden participation in computing for students with visual or physical impairments? The techniques developed by ARoPability will advance the state-of-the-art in engaging students with disabilities in computing activities.
The field of robotics is extremely popular across generations of students. Educational robotics has been shown to encourage non-traditional students to consider careers in computing and has even been adopted as part of core computer-science curriculum at a number of Universities. Unfortunately, the scarcity of accessible interfaces to educational robots can lead to students with disabilities not having equal participation with peers in robot-based computing activities. In fact, most interfaces that allow robot programming are built on traditional visual and keyboard-based inputs. And yet, even if you solely examine the needs of students with visual impairments, there is sufficient diversity in the interfaces required - 10% are registered Braille readers, 27% are visual readers, 7% are auditory readers, 34% are non-readers, and 23% are pre-readers. As such, in this project, we focused on capitalizing on the appeal of robotics in order to both deliver and engage pre-college level students with disabilities in computing. During the life of this project, we developed and introduced new accessible interfaces to facilitate programming of robots for students with disabilities. Using these interfaces, we ran a number of camps, workshops, and after-school programs which engaged middle and high school students with disabilities by 1) teaching students with visual impairments how to program robots using text-to-speech screen readers, magnification software, and haptic/auditory feedback for robot interaction, 2) teaching students with motor impairments how to program robots using accessible interfaces and switch-accessible Apps for robot interaction, 3) teaching students with developmental disabilities, such as children with Autism, how to program robots using story-telling processes, and 4) providing curriculum that enables students to test their skills sets by programming their robots in various challenges. Challenges that the robot were programmed to do included: 1) enabling the robot to participate in childhood games (such as kick-the-can and musical chairs), 2) enabling the robot to complete a maze, and 3) enabling the robot to draw a picture of their choosing. Over the life of the project, we ran 10 sessions of workshops, summer camps, after-school programs and 3 professional development-training workshops for special-ed teachers. The number of student participants with disabilities included: 107 middle school and high school students with visual impairments and 18 middle and high school students with physical and/or developmental disabilities. This work also resulted in over 17 peer-reviewed publications, filing of an international patent, and licensing of the developed technology to a start-up company for commercialization.
