Toward inclusive learning: Designing and evaluating tangible programming blocks for visually impaired students

Abstract

Tangible programming toolkits are widely used to nurture computational literacy in the young generation. However, novice learners with visual impairment have been neglected as these toolkits are primarily designed for sighted students, and mostly rely on visual cues in the whole manipulation process. To fill this gap, we present CodeRhythm (Fig. 1), a tangible programming toolkit for engaging blind and visually impaired (BVI) students to learn basic programming concepts by creating simple melodies. In this paper, we describe the design features of CodeRhythm and discuss the feedback and future improvement based on the preliminary user study.Fig. 1.