By Nidhi Kalra

When the Braille Tutor was being field tested in the Mathru School for the Blind in India, one of our happy surprises was discovering its use as a diagnostic tool – something we hadn’t planned. Since six of the eight teachers at the school are also visually impaired, they often give students exercises in writing braille using a slate and stylus and evaluate their performance based on the end result by reading the braille written by the student.

One of the students who participated in our field study was diagnosed by his teacher as not being able to write braille since his writing usually consisted of a single cell with all the dots embossed, regardless of the assignment. It appeared that he had no conceptual understanding of braille though he had been in braille class for a few years. To the teachers’ delight, this student began writing braille as soon as he was asked to use our tutor. Apparently this student had always been writing every letter in the same cell, thus creating the completely embossed single cell. This was not evident to the student’s teacher because the teacher herself was blind and could only feel the results of the writing on the paper; moreover, the student was unable to communicate well and explain what he was writing.

Because our Braille Tutor is able to interpret and read out aloud each letter as soon as the student finishes writing it, the teacher realized that the student understood how to write braille letters but had not understood that he needed to write each letter in a separate cell. In this way, the tutor acted as a diagnostic tool: it highlighted the student’s unique difficulties and was able to provide insight to the blind teacher.

To see how students and teachers use the Braille Tutor (version 1), please view the following movies:

Student writes the braille alphabet

Student writes “apple”

Teacher shows a student how to use the Braille Tutor

By Ling Xu

In the United States, deaf students who learn sign language must learn both American Sign Language (ASL) and English, each with its own grammatical and sentence structure. This requires extensive practice which may not be available especially at home if their parents do not know ASL. Our project, DeSIGN, focused on giving students practice with English vocabulary words and their corresponding ASL sign in a fun and interactive way.

Having built this project from an idea to a deployable tutor has been a rewarding but challenging experience. The process involved coming up with the design details of the tutor to suit the needs of the audience as well as making it feasible within the scope of the project and time. Because the domain of this project is very different from my research areas, starting the project and deciding on a design necessitated a lot of background research. From talking with faculty and students in various research areas and many discussions with Joyce (our collaborator at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf), we learned a lot and were able to apply what we learned to the tutor.

Additionally, this project has shown me that teamwork is vital to the success of a project. Working with a partner requires that both of us are up-to-date on the various parts of the project. Being able to brainstorm ideas and discuss problems has made this project much easier and allowed us to come up with more creative solutions to obstacles that have arisen. We were also fortunate enough to have the expertise and knowledge of Joyce throughout the project. Her input and feedback were invaluable in making the tutor more usable and effective as a tool.

This project has been an enriching experience for me. Applying technology to the non-traditional domain of deaf education has broadened my understanding of how computing works in society. The process of coming up with an idea and going through one software cycle has enabled me to appreciate the challenges of developing a usable application. I have been able to share this unique experience with other people in addition to having an edge regarding scholarship applications and interviews.

By Noura El-Moughny

When I was a little child, I used to play X/O with my elder sister and most of the time she would win. I remember every time she won, I got more determined to win the next game we played. I used to sit at home for hours practicing while she was in school at the morning. Winning the X/O game was the most challenging thing for me back then.

Years passed, and I joined the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. I joined the school without really knowing what computer science is about. My first two years at the university were fun but I wasn’t challenged or excited about the field the same way I used to be when I played X/O with my sister. I wasn’t sure how computer science would be beneficial to myself and my region. I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t applied the knowledge I learned in classrooms to real applications. I lacked the determination and excitement I had for winning the X/O game. I needed a lightning bolt to activate that excitement about the field.

This lightning bolt came through working with the TechBridgeWorld program in my junior year — more specifically, working on the Braille Tutor project. Eventually, I did my senior thesis on the Braille Tutor, focusing on adapting the device to Arabic culture. I worked closely with the Al-Noor Institute, a school for blind children in Qatar, to enhance the Braille Tutor. My interaction with the blind children and teachers at the school made me appreciate all the knowledge I had gained and made me realize how valuable computer science could be in my region.

By Ayorkor Mills-Tettey

In my first semester of the Ph.D. program in the Robotics Institute, I told my advisor that I would like to teach a robotics course in Ghana. TechBridgeWorld helped make that happen. The goal wasn’t as much to teach one robotics course in Ghana specifically as it was to learn about how technology education can be enhanced in developing communities in order to foster innovation and help the younger generation develop technical creativity. With the help of robotics faculty at Carnegie Mellon and in collaboration with a Ghanaian university, we developed an introductory robotics course which was piloted at Ashesi University.

Like any robotics course, it was a lot of work both for the instructors and for the students. Week after week, the students worked hard on their projects, sometimes experiencing a lot of frustration as they realized how hard it was to get a robot to work. On many nights, the students stayed in the lab till late, which was a sacrifice for many of them since they had quite long commutes across the city by public transportation to get to campus. On the last day of the course, there was a great turnout for the concluding poster session. The students started out very nervous, but became quite confident and animated when they realized how impressed their audience was with their projects. For me, the best moment in the course when when the final student handed in his project report and, among other things about the course, said: “I used to be afraid, but I have more confidence now.”

By Ayorkor Mills-Tettey

When you are a child from low income family growing up in Accra, Ghana, you do not have many opportunities available to you, and any opportunity for advancement is greeted with great enthusiasm. We learned more about what this means when we conducted pilot tests in Accra of an automated reading tutor to help children improve their reading abilities in English. We worked with an under-resourced public school who were so grateful to participate in the project that they had all the logistics arranged within two days. On the first day, a Friday, we met with the headmistress to tell her about Project Kané and its aims to investigate the effectiveness of automated tutoring to help children improve their reading abilities. She immediately agreed to it, introduced us to the teachers, facilitated the selection of the children who would participate in the project, and invited the children’s parents to a meeting at the school on Monday. On Monday morning, the parents arrived, were briefed about the project, signed consent forms, and the project started!

Most of the parents of the children who participated in the study were traders, tailors, and others working in the informal sector of the Ghanaian economy. Few of them had a secondary or even a primary education, and few were functionally literate or fluent in English. Their children, however have to attend school conducted in English, and like many children from similar backgrounds, are several grade levels behind in their reading abilities. The headmistress was a valuable resource in helping to explain to the parents, in their respective native languages, the purpose of the study and the contents of the consent form. The only concern the parents had was whether they would have to pay anything for their children’s participation in the project, and were relieved that this was not the case.

For the three weeks of the pilot study, the children each used the reading tutor for 30 minutes every day at a nearby internet cafe that had donated computer time to the project. We would pick up the children up from school each day and although it was more convenient to use the back gate of the school, they always wanted us to use the front gate so that they could wave to the other children as they arrived and left. It was clear that they felt like celebrities!

None of the children had ever used a computer before. We started off by showing the children how when they move the mouse, the cursor on the screen moves as well, and when they type at the keyboard, the letters show up on the screen. They were excited to type their names, and a couple of smart children immediately wanted to know how to type uppercase letters and erase letters when they made mistakes. It took only a couple of sessions to bring them up to speed with using the reading tutor. We had 12 children from the school participating, but the internet cafe had donated the use of only four computers, so the children had to wait their turn to use the tutor and the patience that this required was challenging for them. We tried to keep them occupied with crayons and coloring as they waited and this was initially novel to them but they soon became very efficient and would finish their coloring pages in ten minutes and would then want to know when it would be their turn to use the tutor — because how could coloring compare with practicing reading with a computer!

The pilot study showed that the use of the automated tutor is feasible even with children who have not used a computer before, but have a basic understanding of English. Apart from the potential benefits to the children’s reading abilities, the use of a computer as a tool can be empowering to children who have never had the opportunity to do so. At the end of the pilot study, the headmistress expressed her heartfelt gratitude to us, and the teachers wanted to know whether they could have an opportunity to participate in such a project!