Whenever I describe the work with primary children in schools for the blind in India to someone who is hearing it for the first time, I see that they are waiting to hear about the cool tech that we have come up with, letting the other descriptions about cards and toys pass by. "Yes, yes, ok, these are interesting, but where is the cool tech?" A different way of posing the same question is, "Why will Microsoft be interested in this?". The first answer is that we are in a long term project, a very long term project that is counted in years and not in months and we are looking at reaching every child who is blind or low vision across India, not just in one class or in one school. In short, we are looking at long term capacity building in schools, the teachers, and the students to come up to speed in Computational Thinking.
That Computational thinking (CT) is important for children to pick up as early as starting from grade 1 has been widely accepted around the world, though the exact definition of what one means by CT is still being debated. To sidestep this debate we are using the CT curriculum developed by ACM India as our reference and authority. The curriculum, teaching resources, and material as well as a community around the introduction of CT in schools across India are all hosted at cspathshala.org
Having taken care of all questions like, what is CT, how do you know this is the right definition of CT, is it appropriate for children in primary schools in India, etc., we can proceed to address the specific challenge of making CT accessible to children who are blind or low vision. Our long term goal is to create and host content that is equivalent to and possibly better than the content for sighted children hosted by cspathshala.org.
Like any structure of significance, one has to start at the foundations to be able to build a new structure with long term growth and stability. Examining the content of Grade 1 CT curriculum, the first theme is "Systematic Listing, counting, and reasoning", the ability to deal with real-world objects by listing them, counting them, and reasoning about them. The very first lesson in grade 1 deals with the ability of children to count from 1 to 10 and to be able to count objects. The basic assumption is by the time the children come to grade 1, even if they have not been to pre-school or to KG classes of any kind, that they have some notion of numbers, that many have seen and know the way numbers are written and what each one is called. This and other assumptions about the sense of numbers that the child might have are most likely invalid in the case of children who are born blind or are become blind very early in life.
There are many complex and varied reasons for this situation. For instance, sighted children learn about many aspects of objects and their behavior in the natural world as early as a month or two after birth (a study of child development literature will clarify the developmental stages of an average child with no impairments). The presence or absence of the mother of one's hand or foot in the visual field, number of fingers in the hand, etc. Concepts of more or less, empty and full, bigger and smaller are absorbed as part of the process of going up with a rich visual experience. Children who are born blind do not have these experiences. And such notions have to be conveyed and inferred using alternate sensory modalities, primarily tactile at a very young age followed by sounds and language as the child picks up language skills. However, this assumes that the child is in an environment where the lack of vision is detected very early and the home environment is well resourced to provide the baby with stimuli in these alternate modalities. Such assumptions are mostly invalid in countries like India, where even identification of vision impairment and even blindness may take a few months after birth, and acceptance of blindness of a child may take even longer. Even with early detection and acceptance, there is limited knowledge and sources of information about how best to stimulate a blind child to provide life experiences in general and concepts about objects and counting and matching language acquisition. Besides, the resources needed to provide such alternate development support are more often than not unavailable: India has the largest number of people who are blind and most of the blind belong to socio-economically weaker sections.
The combination of the above results in blind children joining the school, if they are fortunate to be able, with deficiencies in terms of their knowledge and understanding as compared to sighted peers of their age. In addition, due to the lack of knowledge and information, many parents of blind children find out about schools for the blind quite late and so in many grade 1 classes in schools for the blind the age of children may range from 6 to even 10.
Given the deficit that blind children come to school with, it is essential to build up skills in numeracy before we can go to the next levels of listing counting and reasoning. And our approach is the Ludic Design for Accessibility. One can read the paper to understand the details, but for our purposes, we need to create games and toys that children will enjoy playing, and in playing these games over extended periods of time (since they enjoy it and not because someone is forcing them to play) will acquire the basic skills of numeracy and will be well prepared to step up to the next levels of computational thinking.
There are certain basic principles that we work with. First, we do not want to create games and toys ONLY for the blind. We want toys and games that are inclusive: sighted, low vision and blind, young and old, children and teachers, children and parents and neighbors. Second, wherever possible, not to invent any new game or toy, but to work with the countless toys and games that humanity has played with over the ages, and repurpose them to meet our needs. Third, follow the Ludic Design principles at all stages: this means that the children should be free to play or not, be able to agree on the rules of the game, and be free to create new rules. The important part of the LDA methodology is worth emphasizing: testing and evaluation have to be indistinguishable from play, for the children who are playing.
Given these, we have been exploring a whole range of games and toys ranging from toys like Pallanguli (mancala), Daayam, and snakes and ladders from antiquity to more recent ones like Ludo and a deck of playing cards. The primary challenge that we face is that almost all of the games have evolved and are played usually by the sighted. People with vision impairments have also played these games but usually in a passive way: for example, by rolling the die in their turn and someone else makes the moves. Chess is a major exception where with some minor accommodations to distinguish the black from the white pieces, the blind can play the game at very high competitive levels. It is no coincidence that even sighted chess players occasionally demonstrate their mastery by playing blindfolded. This is an indication of the fact that there is nothing inherently visual about the game and the depth of the complexity does not come from the shape of the pawn or the rook.
So the first step in working with any of the above games is to explore how it can be played autonomously by two blind children. The autonomy in play is important since otherwise the play will be 'controlled' by the persons assisting the children and not by them and hence it ceases to play for them.
The components of the toys may need to be modified to make them accessible. or specific additional scaffolding may have to be invented and evaluated with repeated play by the children. For each of the toys/games, several levels of play have to be tried out, starting from a novice level to increasingly challenging levels. these experiments have to be done as part of multiple play sessions with the children ensuring that each of the sessions is filled with fun and joy and that the children continue to retain their freedom to play or not to play. Their inputs and suggestions on what they enjoy more and what they understand better will feed into the next iteration of the game/toy.
Our goal is to create a bouquet of such games and toys with each of them having a range of 'levels' at which they can be played and then create a structure in the school curriculum to allocate two sessions each school week for the children to play these games. we hypothesize that with such play over a year, the children will acquire a lasting conceptual understanding of numbers and numeracy that will then be available for making progress in other areas in STEM.
We intend this to be made available for children from grades 1 to 3 while they continue with their other existing classes. In parallel to this effort, we are working on ways to introduce digital skills to the same children, starting from Grade 2 onwards. The main reason to leave out Grade 1 is that as mentioned earlier, children joining schools for the blind start with many deficits, not restricted to numeracy. These include orientation and mobility, the ability to take personal care of themselves, learn Braille, critical for literacy, and to be able to interact with others beyond their immediate family. Educators of children with vision impairment are uniformly clear that introduction to technology too early will lead to these children picking up less than the level of competence needed in all of these critical activities.
Digital skilling for the blind is a separate massive exercise by itself. However, as the children progress with numeracy using tangible physical toys, they will be ready to use technology to accelerate their mastery of these concepts and be able to catch up with their sighted peers. Thus technology has a major role to play in the learning process of the blind, but it has to be introduced at the right stage after pre-requisite skills have been acquired using physical/tangible means. So the answer to the question originally posed is, yes there is technology if you look at the big picture.