Including universal design in a summer camp workshop on robotics

Abstract

In this paper we will describe a summer camp short-course intended for high-school students with excellent qualifications. The course is addressed to students who are thinking on studying a technical career including a section on universal design for the first time. The department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Universitat de Barcelona will host a workshop on robotics next summer within the context of Campus Científicos de Verano by Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología.. High-school students will be selected around Spain based on their qualifications and motivation to attend the workshop. The first activity in the summer camp will be the building of Lego Mindstorms robots. These robots contain several sensors and actuators that can be programmed to do different tasks. One of the robots will be programmed to be able to track a line and another two will be programmed to do a Sumo fight on their own. Students will learn how to use sensors and actuators and code programming algorithms. For the second activity the students will develop a Mobile App with the MIT App Inventor2 software [1] in order to control the robots. In this activity students will learn how to program apps in a simple way to complete their understanding of programming. Taking into account European Higher Education Area requirements for Accessibility in technical careers, this workshop will introduce an innovation; the third activity will consist in the adaptation of the app and robots for multimodal access (including sound and sight redundant warnings) and the readjustment of the app’s buttons for users with motor and visual disabilities (e.g. making the buttons bigger and with non-repeating behaviour). Students attending the summer camp will be introduced to the needs and skills of different user profiles of people with disabilities. After this theoretical introduction, they will experience motor and visual disabilities with simulations inspired by the Inclusive design Toolkit resource [2] ].And finally, they will modify the app based on IEEE RWEP Accessible apps by Ayanna Howard [3] so to maximise the accessibility possibilities of App Inventor. Complementary resources will be made available to those students showing interest in this area, such as RWEP prosthetic hands projects, other toolkits and bibliography. This will serve as a first experience for the students and there is no prevision of including technical aids such as GRID2 or similar [4] due to budget restrictions. There are no students with disabilities registered for this year edition so the course does not seek accessibility for participants as authors. We will consider working on accessibility for participants of the following editions of this workshop, building on past experiences reaching this goal [5] [6] [7]. The main focus of the workshop is to encourage the creative learning of a robots summer camp [8], [9] with the inclusion of universal design as an essential requirement in the design and development of computer applications or systems. With this initiative we want to increase awareness on accessibility requirements for future technical students.PID U