TACTOPI: a Playful Approach to Promote Computational Thinking for Visually Impaired Children

Abstract

The use of playful activities is common in introductory programming settings. Visually, these activities tend to be stimulating enough. However, these are not accessible for visually impaired children. This work presents TACTOPI -a system that consists of a tangible environment that provides navigation skills training and enriches sensorial experiences using sound, visual and tactile elements; It allows the learning of introductory concepts of computational thinking embedded in playful activities with storytelling that promote environmental education for children with visual impairments from 4 to 7 years old. The map is modular, customizable and has a docking system to place the elements allowing a fun tactile interaction. Another essential element is the 3D printed helm containing a joystick and buttons for the child to control and pre-program the instructions to be played by the robot. A study was carried out using a qualitative questionnaire to evaluate the system. Suggestions were collected from respondents experienced with blind children about the suitability, relevance and accessibility of this system for these children. From the results, it is possible to conclude that this is a tool that, despite some limitations, is efficient to introduce computational thinking; interactive elements that support activities in other disciplines and contexts; a tool that ensures accessibility and supports task training for the development of blind children.

Understanding Tabletop Games Accessibility: Exploring Board and Card Gaming Experiences of People who are Blind and Low Vision

“…Unlike digital gaming research, tabletop gaming research has mainly focused on the creation of accessible games for educational purposes [54,76]. Studies have found that different methods of tactile gameplay were effective in teaching BLV youth a variety of programming concepts [1,47,50]. Others have found that tabletop games can aid parents in teaching their children Braille [34].…”

“…To address this question, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 BLV individuals who shared their experiences and opinions on the current state of accessibility in tabletop gaming. Through thematic analysis, participants highlighted the themes including (1) properties of inaccessible gaming, (2) outcomes of inaccessible games, (3) properties of accessible games, and (4) outcomes of accessible games. Our study contributions are the following:…”

Inaccessibility maps to support sighted people using visually impaired people’s white cane data

“…The previous studies aimed at supporting the visually impaired are diverse and include research on reading and writing [3,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14], which are difficult for the visually impaired, as well as on various activities such as supporting visually impaired children to play [5], enjoy soccer games [15], record with a camera [16], create music [17], play games [18], and use virtual reality (VR) systems [19][20][21].…”

“…Therefore, those support activities important to the visually impaired in daily life, such as transportation [2], reading [3], and writing [4] have been closely studied. Recent research has focused on activities that enrich their lives, such as children's play [5] and photography [6]. Directly expressed, most of these studies view the visually impaired as "receivers" of support.…”

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].…”