At MARM last Sunday,
Cary Supalo spoke about
work he is doing to make chemistry labs, and science in general, more open to the blind and visually impaired. Though blind himself, Cary is working on his PhD in Chemistry Education at Penn State and is doing some pretty neat stuff to apply technology to the problems of communicating physical and chemical properties (color from flame analysis, density of precipitates, etc.) to the blind.
Cary was really interested in the FIRST robotics programs and wondered what it would take to make them more accessible to the blind. He brought up a good example where NASA has created a summer space camp program,
Rocket On!, for blind high school students - and asks us: if they can assemble, launch and recover rockets, is there any reason blind people can't build and drive robots?
Before we parted on Sunday, Cary challenged us to work with the National Federation for the Blind to create a blind FIRST robotics workshop with the stretch goal of a blind FIRST team. I'm game and he's willing to see if NASA could add a robotics module to the Rocket On! program, or create a new workshop just for robotics. It seems to me that with our existing NASA connections and coming off FLL's No Limits challenge, this should be very doable. Maybe an avenue for FVC?
So, my first questions to the CD community are:
- Is anyone already doing this? (a quick search of CD didn't turn up anything)
- Do any of you already have blind or visually impaired team members or mentors? (Old guys with bifocals don't count!)
- If so, what areas do/did they work in, were there any issues and did they bring new perspectives to the team?
- How could we make this work?