CardBot - Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired in Educational Robotics: Experiments and Results

We proposes an educational assistive methodology aiming to provide the access to educational robotics activities to students with visual impairments or low vision. As an approach to soften the main issues related to this challenging problem, we introduce a low cost, assistive technology, called CardBot 2.0. Basically, this model for teaching-learning is composed by a programming environment, a mobile application, and several geometric cards, each of them representing a specific action that is recognized by the application with a tag. So, the student can program the robot by selecting and organizing geometric cards on the surface of a board or on a table. Also a contribution of this work being part of the solution, the professor can create new cards and register the respective actions and tags. This allows the professor to add new actions for the robot or even to create a new language. We validated our approach by performing experimental classes for students with different visual impairments and ages, and for students without impairment, with an analysis of the results, qualitative.