Designing Protractor and Compass Learning Aid for Visually-Impaired Primary Students

This paper presents a design and implementation of an inexpensive learning aid device for teaching visually-impaired students the concepts of angles and directions. The device combines the feature from regular protractor and compass, with added functionalities such as Braille labels and voice, allowing students to learn and review the concepts without frequent intervention from the teachers. This is achieved by using Arduino microcontroller with a variable resistor to detect the pointer's movement and orientation. When the pointer is adjusted to a desired angle, the device speaks in user's preferred language the angle in degrees using the sound module. Our proposed device can tell from 0 - 360 degrees on horizontal plane in 5-degree increment. Evaluation of the device was conducted with 2 groups of volunteers, both sighted and visually-impaired students, who tested all features of the device and provided scores in 4 aspects which are ease of use, design, operation on angle mode, and operation on direction mode. The device received overall high scores in all aspects from both groups, indicating the viability of using the device in a real school setting.