Tac-Trace: A Tangible User Interface-Based Solution for Teaching Shape Concepts to Visually Impaired Children

A novel, low-cost, Arabic language tangible user interface (TUI)-based solution for teaching and reinforcing the concepts of planar shapes and their relationships to visually impaired (VI) children is presented. The solution employs a computer vision-based system to track tagged 3D-printed objects which children can manipulate to receive audio instructions and feedback in the context of various activities for learning progressively difficult shape concepts in a systematic manner. A graphical user interface (GUI) is also provided for the teachers to create and manage student accounts, track their students’ individual progress and download and print the templates and models of the tangible tokens along with their barcodes. The aim is to provide an engaging, accessible solution that would mitigate the demands on the time, efforts and financial resources of the teachers while allowing children to autonomously learn and review shape concepts at their own pace. By utilizing off-the-shelf components for setting up the TUI and providing templates and CAD models for generating the tangible tokens, we have endeavored to make the system affordable and easily reproducible. The system has been developed in consultation with teachers for VI children to ensure its compliance with current teaching and classroom practices. Initial evaluations of the system with VI children and their teachers have validated its potential and yielded valuable design recommendations which would not only inform the design of future iterations of our system but also benefit other researchers seeking to build similar systems.