Optical Braille Blocks for Visually Impaired Elementary Education

Abstract

Learning through play has always proved its effectiveness in elementary education and has yielded prolific results. Although there are trained instructors, special schools, specific toys and facilities for Visually Impaired (VI), yet the communication between tutors and special children holds a significant gap. Also, tools in market are either too expensive or available in limited quantity in underdeveloped countries. This paper presents a cost effective solution for visually impaired children to play and learn via Braille blocks. These blocks are designed by embossed motives representing numbers, alphabets, shapes and mathematical operators with Infra-Red (IR) tags. The blocks transmit Infrared codes when come in contact with the system. The Braille Blocks System consists of a battery, optical detectors and controller which performs detection and processing of selected IR pattern. This system comprises of three different learning modules namely Words Game, Shapes Game and Math Game. These modules are further divided into several sub-game sections so that the children can learn and improve their communication and academic skills. The presence of audio feedback elevates a child’s capabilities to memorize and concentrate on self-learning and spatial coordination in a fascinating way. The designed system was tested on 20 blind children in “National Special Education Complex” Karachi, Pakistan and an assessment was conducted on basis of different types of errors encountered by children. The suitability of the system was also evaluated by taking feedback from blind students through a questionnaire, proving its effectiveness with 79% of blind children giving either good or very good feedback.

Tac-Trace: A Tangible User Interface-Based Solution for Teaching Shape Concepts to Visually Impaired Children

“…In recent years, the effectiveness of TUIs for learning abstract concepts, especially for children, coupled with the importance of touch as a sensory substitution modality for the VI has particularly sparked interest in investigating the use of TUIs for the education of VI children, resulting in several TUI-based solutions being proposed for teaching various concepts to VI children, such as Braille letters and words [29,[41][42][43][44], Braille numbers and mathematical operations [45][46][47][48][49][50], computational thinking [51] and programming skills [52][53][54][55].…”

“…Lozano et al [28] teach about shapes, textures, and numbers using physical objects with embedded NFC tags that when placed on a surface are recognized by an application running on a mobile phone with an NFC reader located beneath that surface; the child is asked to put specific objects on the surface and appropriate auditory feedback is provided. Baqai et al [29] use infra-red (IR) tag-embedded blocks with embossed motifs representing numbers, alphabets, shapes and mathematical operators to teach about words, shapes and mathematical concepts via quiz-based games with appropriate auditory feedback; to keep the cost down, rather than using a mainstream desktop or mobile computing device, the system utilizes low-cost hardware components -a battery, optical detectors and a microcontroller -for the detection and processing of the IR patterns.…”

“…Initial evaluations of the above systems with VI users have yielded positive results validating the potential of using TUIbased solutions for teaching shape and geometry concepts to the VI. However, most of these systems (such as [27], [31] and [29]) require specialized hardware components which the teachers and caregivers of VI children may find hard to acquire and put together themselves. Also, solutions like Rühmann et al's [30], Lozano et al's [28] and Baqai et al's [29] are still at a preliminary stage teaching only simple shape identification and need to be developed further to teach more advanced concepts such as similarity and congruence and relationships among various shapes.…”

“…However, most of these systems (such as [27], [31] and [29]) require specialized hardware components which the teachers and caregivers of VI children may find hard to acquire and put together themselves. Also, solutions like Rühmann et al's [30], Lozano et al's [28] and Baqai et al's [29] are still at a preliminary stage teaching only simple shape identification and need to be developed further to teach more advanced concepts such as similarity and congruence and relationships among various shapes. Moreover, systems like Baqai et al's [29] that employ embossed motifs of shapes at fixed orientations neither afford shapes to be reoriented and explored from all angles which is deemed to be important for shape recognition by blind individuals [6] nor do these allow different shapes to be placed next to each other to gain a deeper understanding of how certain shapes can be combined to make other shapes.…”

“…Only a handful of TUI-based solutions for teaching shape and geometry concepts to VI children have been introduced so far. Even though 3D printing has been extensively utilized in recent years to create static manipulatives for teaching VI students about various STEM topics (see [26] for a detailed review), most existing TUI-based systems [27][28][29] for teaching shape and geometry concepts to the VI do not appear to have availed of this option for creating TUI components; the few that have done so [30,31] do not offer users the facility of downloading CAD models to 3D print the tangible objects themselves. Also, most of these solutions are prototypes for exploratory studies which simply introduce basic concepts but do not allow the child to advance to increasingly complex notions in a systematic manner via tutorials, practice and tests.…”