Haptic Group Work Tools
Group work is an important part of the mandatory school years in Sweden. It does not only enable collaborative problem solving and learning, but also helps in forming social bands and skills during the early years of life. Taking part in group work activities can be especially challenging for visually impaired pupils, since they are usually the only visually impaired pupils in their respective class and can often not use the same material as the sighted pupils do. This creates problems with establishing common ground and has been shown to lead to exclusion of visually impaired pupils from parts of the work.
Research on technical solutions for supporting collaboration between sighted and visually impaired pupils during group work in school is sparse and the main aim of this project is to find means by which collaborative learning environments based on haptic and audio can be used to include the visually impaired pupil in the group work process. Results show examples of what is needed for a visually impaired pupil to be fully aware of the work process such that the pupil can benefit from group work.
Video 1. 3D Haptic collaborative virtual environment.
Video 2. 3D haptic, auditory and visual interface for group work on coordinate systems.
Video 3. 3D haptic, auditory and visual interface for group work on geography.
Team
Current members
- Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander, Professor at Royal Institute of Technology
- Kjetil Falkenberg, Associate Professor at Royal Institute of Technology
- Jonas Moll, Assistant Professor at Örebro University
- Axess Lab AB
- The Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired, SRF
- The National Agency for Special Needs Education and Schools, SPSM
Funding
2019 - 2021 Vinnova
2013 - 2016 MUMI project funded by the Swedish Research Council, VR NT
2006 - 2011 MCE project funded by the Swedish Research Council, VR NT
2004 - 2007 MICOLE project funded by EU IST 6th framework program