Collaborative software engineering education between college seniors and blind high school students

Abstract

We describe a collaborative software engineering course between sighted college students and high school students with visual impairments. We designed the course as a mentorship experience, in which one college student mentor is connected to one high school student mentee. Each pair of students is responsible for a programming project. The students must learn to communicate programming concepts and software designs, to work with colleagues with very different levels of software engineering knowledge, and to overcome problems related to visual accessibility. We have implemented our course in a pilot program with five mentors and five mentees. This paper covers our course design, initial experiences, and recommendations for future implementations.