IJIEST - Vol. 1 - Issue 1 - July 2019
ISSN 2612-6990
Pages: 9

Educational Non-Visual Environment for Symbolic Programming of Cartesian Motion to include Children with Visual Impairment into Robotic Sciences

Authors: Francisco J. Ruiz-Sanchez, Enrique Mireles-Rodriguez, Gustavo Guzman Solis
Categories: Journal

Abstract - Robotic Sciences, as a fundamental research area in modern technology, is an attractive opportunity for professional-fulfilment that must be instilled from a young age. Unfortunately, teaching and didactic material are mainly visual, excluding blind or partially sighted children of an early inclusion in robotics that results in a critical disadvantage with respect to their peers in the labor market. In this paper, we present a non-visual programming environment for visual impaired children. This environment is designed to foster the ability of coding motion tasks by teaching basic concepts of programming with an experimental reinforcement. The environment is a robotic platform for Cartesian motion with a block-programming interface and its didactic strategy of gradual complexity. We introduce a symbolic language of the egocentric Cartesian movements and we describe its implementation for visual impaired users as safe and friendly tokens with tactile images and auditory assistance. The programming interface includes a set of assembling tokens and a desk-board with multi-ports to connect strings of tokens coding algorithms. The sequence of tokens in a string is identified and verified before being sent to the robot platform, introducing the users into the general process of coding and debugging. The environment is implemented as a centralized network with a main computer and branches of master-slave microprocessors in a wireless connection for the robot. We broadly describe the didactic strategy to teach the basic concepts of programming using the environment and we conclude showing its final implementation.

Keywords: Accessibility to Disabled Users, Blind inclusion in Robotics, Educational non-visual programming interface, Robotics for visually impaired


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F.J. Ruiz-Sanchez, E. Mireles-Rodriguez, G. Guzman Solis. Educational Non-Visual Environment for Symbolic Programming of Cartesian Motion to include Children with Visual Impairment into Robotic Sciences. IJIEST. 2019 July 1; 1 (1): 1-9.