Projects Overview

Programming has become a highly sought-after skill in STEM-related studies and careers, but it has only reached a fraction of students with visual impairments. Therefore, there is a need to explore new methods for teaching and learning. This study aims to understand the potential of using drones to create an authentic learning environment to help students with visual impairments learn programming. Based on a month-long engagement with five students with visual impairments, we present insights on using drones to support programming education for students with visual impairments.

Programming is challenging but empowering. We observed that all the students preferred mainstream IDEs and languages, which would be useful for their future career and studies. Drone programming offers them an opotunity to engage in personally meaningful tasks - as they have many ideas on how drones can be programmed into an assistive device to them. Further, all the students were excited and curious to play with cool technology and control a flying robot. Unlike traditional learning schemes with highly visual output, drones increase the physicality of the programming output via multisensory feedback, such as audio and somatosensory feedback.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in using robots to support Blind and Low Vision people in various tasks and contexts. However, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community still lacks a shared understanding of what, where, and how robots can benefit BLV users in their daily lives. In light of this, we conducted a systematic literature review to help researchers navigate the current landscape of this field through an HCI lens. We followed a systematic multi-stage approach and carefully selected a corpus of 76 papers from premier HCI venues. Our review provides a comprehensive overview of application areas, embodiments, and interaction techniques of the developed robotic systems. Further, we identified opportunities, challenges, and key considerations in this emerging field. Through this systematic review, we aim to inspire researchers, developers, designers, and HCI practitioners, to create a more inclusive environment for the BLV community.

tbc! For now, if you want to know more, please refer to the paper :/

tbc

tbc as well