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Exploring accessible programming with educators and visually impaired children

Published: 21 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Previous attempts to make block-based programming accessible to visually impaired children have mostly focused on audio-based challenges, leaving aside spatial constructs, commonly used in learning settings. We sought to understand the qualities and flaws of current programming environments in terms of accessibility in educational settings. We report on a focus group with IT and special needs educators, where they discussed a variety of programming environments for children, identifying their merits, barriers and opportunities. We then conducted a workshop with 7 visually impaired children where they experimented with a bespoke tangible robot-programming environment. Video recordings of such activity were analyzed with educators to discuss children's experiences and emergent behaviours. We contribute with a set of qualities that programming environments should have to be inclusive to children with different visual abilities, insights for the design of situated classroom activities, and evidence that inclusive tangible robot-based programming is worth pursuing.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IDC '20: Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference
      June 2020
      642 pages
      ISBN:9781450379816
      DOI:10.1145/3392063
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 21 June 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. accessible
      2. children
      3. educators
      4. programming
      5. robots
      6. tangible
      7. visual impairments

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      IDC '20: Interaction Design and Children
      June 21 - 24, 2020
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      Cited By

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      • (2024)Drones for all: Creating an Authentic Programming Experience for Students with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3688516(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
      • (2024)Envisioning Collaborative Futures: Advancing the Frontiers of Embedded ResearchProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops - Volume 210.1145/3661455.3669890(190-193)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024
      • (2023)TACTOPI: Exploring Play with an Inclusive Multisensory Environment for Children with Mixed-Visual AbilitiesProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589389(411-422)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
      • (2023)“My Unconditional Homework Buddy:” Exploring Children’s Preferences for a Homework Companion RobotProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589388(375-387)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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      • (2023)Coding Together: On Co-located and Remote Collaboration between Children with Mixed-Visual AbilitiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581261(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
      • (2023)Leveraging Robotics to Enhance Accessibility and Engagement in Mathematics Education for Vision-Impaired Students2023 5th International Congress on Human-Computer Interaction, Optimization and Robotic Applications (HORA)10.1109/HORA58378.2023.10156748(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2023
      • (2023)Offline and online user experience of gamified robotics for introducing computational thinkingComputers & Education10.1016/j.compedu.2022.104664193:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2023
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