Abstract:

In this paper we describe a summer camp short course addressed to higher school students with excellent qualifications, planning to enrol in a technical career, including, for first time, a section on universal design.

The department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Universitat de Barcelona will hold a workshop on robotics next summer within the context of "Campus Científicos de Verano" by "Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología". This workshop will be attended by high school students selected throughout Spain upon their qualifications and interest.

As a first activity, the summer camp will consist in building Lego Mindstorms robots. These robots include several sensors and actuators and will be programmed to do different tasks. Among them, one robot will be able to line tracking and two robots will be able to do a Sumo fight autonomously. Students will learn how to use sensors and actuators and how to code programming algorithms.

As a second activity, students attending the workshop will develop a Mobile App with the MIT App Inventor2 software, in order to control the robots, aiming at students not only learning to program robots but also to program apps in a simple way.

As an innovation in this type of workshops, and taking into account European Higher Education Area requirements on Accessibility on technical careers, as a third activity there will be a requirement to adapt the interaction with the app and robots to multimodal access (including sound and sight redundant warnings), and to adapt the buttons of the app for motor disabilities, making them bigger and with non-repeating behaviour.

Students attending the summer camp will learn about different user profiles, needs and skills of people with disabilities. After that, they will work with the Inclusive design Toolkit resource [http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/], wearing glasses and gloves to simulate motor disabilities and visual disabilities. Finally, they will tweak the app maximising the accessibility possibilities of App Inventor, based on IEEE RWEP Accessible apps by Ayanna Howard [http://www.realworldengineering.org/index.php?page=project&n=1&project=20]. There will be complementary resources available to those students showing interest in this area, such as RWEP prosthetic hands projects, other toolkits and bibliography.

As this is a first experience, with a low cost budget, there is no prevision to include technical aids like GRID2 or similar (Encarnaçao, Adams, Londral, 2014). The initiative does not seek accessibility for participants as authors because there are no students with disabilities registered for this year edition. We will consider working on accessibility for participants on next editions of the workshop, building on past experiences reaching this goal (Ludi, 2014)(Howard, 2014) (Kabatova, 2012).

The main focus of the workshop is to improve the creative learning of a robots summer camp (Adams et al, 2010) (Gandy, 2016) with the inclusion of universal design as an essential requirement in the design and development of computer applications or systems. With this initiative we want to increase awareness on accessibility requirements for future technical students.

Keywords:

Robots, high-school, universal design, app development.