"Clicks" Appcessory for Visually Impaired Children

Abstract

Visually impaired children face challenges in learning spatial contents and materials, such as geometry. While many existing tools, such as string boards, or protractors with physical angle markers, can facilitate learning, these devices are highly specific. This problem contributes to low levels numeracy levels in visually impaired individuals. Addressing these problems, this paper presents Clicks, a digital manipulative for visually impaired children (KG to grade 3) that supports a range of geometry education tasks and ties physical adjustments to the device to a dynamic digital representation and additional audio feedback. The tool is a construction kit of simple geometric primitives that snap together to produce a range of more complex forms such as lines, angles, triangles and rectangles. When placed on a tablet computer, the geometry of these objects is sensed (via the capacitive touch screen and electrodes embedded in the objects) and audio feedback provided.