ProGame Tactile - Foundational Coding Skills for the Visually Challenged

Young learners with visual disabilities the world over have limited access to quality resources and more so to resources that can teach them computational thinking skills. Learning to code can be a joyful experience wherein the learners can pick up logical thinking, problem solving, creative thinking and such other important skills. While there are many tools and solutions to learn coding skills for learners with vision, the same cannot be said for learners who are visually challenged. There aren't too many resources that can assist learners with visual impairments to learn coding skills.

It is estimated that there are 285 million visually impaired people around the world. In India alone, there are an estimated 9.3 million visually impaired persons, out of which 270,000 are blind children.

Most schools for the visually challenged are open to teaching various skills to their students with visual disabilities but there aren't enough tools that cater to their needs. Students with visually disabilities are, more often than not, keen on learning skills that their peers with vision learn. However, lack of tools that cater to them often stop them from learning those skills.

The reason we say this is based on a heart-touching experience our team experienced when they were training school students using our original product, ProGame - Coding WITHOUT Computers coding kits, recently in a school in Indore, MP, India. Incidentally, the school also taught students with visual disabilities. One day, after the sessions were over for the day, when the students who were attending the coding classes left, a group of visually-impaired students came to the classroom, touched and felt the coding kits to try understanding what they were. Afterwards, they went to their in-charge and asked him as to when coding skills would be taught to them.

This undoubtedly confirms that there is significant levels of interest but their quest to learn isn't getting satisfied due to unavailability of resources for them. 

Learning coding skills at a young age can be extremely valuable. These skills are learnt not necessarily to pursue careers in Information Technology but to build important skills such as logical thinking, problem solving, creative thinking, analytical thinking and such.

Our solution, ProGame Tactile, solves this problem by enabling learners with visual impairments to learn foundational coding skills. 

To make classrooms that much more inclusive and cater to a truly underserved community, we have created a new coding kit by creating a physical coding kit that comprises of code instructions printed in Braille and English and a mobile app to make it accessible to the visually challenged. We are calling this, ProGame Tactile. This way, thousands of students with vision impairment can now touch-n-feel the physical coding blocks and by using an interactive (audio-enabled) mobile app, can learn fundamentals of coding.

Within ProGame Tactile, the physical blocks have Braille and English embossed on them while the app uses gesture detection and QR code detection to communicate with the users with vision impairment. The app has training modules as well as a "code editor" for users to dictate their pieces of code for the app to run and demonstrate (through audio).

As shown in the picture, a mobile phone can be placed in front of the user with our App open within it. The front facing camera within the phone is something that our App uses to interact with the student via gestures and QR codes. The blocks of code, sprites and backdrops, which are grouped together using rings, can be placed nearby by the student for easy access. Now, with this setup, students can learn to code at a foundational level and later on can use our coding kit to do programs of their own.

The app recognizes the blocks and enables the students to think and use blocks of their choice. After showing a few blocks (one backdrop, a sprite and a few code blocks) to the App, the student, when prompted can show a 'thumbs up' gesture for the app to process, compile and run the program.

The output of the program can be heard by the student as it plays in a step-by-step manner. Kindly refer to the video from minute 1:37 onwards to hear the output of a very basic, sample program.

Our solution can be used by young learners with visual impairments to learn foundational coding skills. Learning to code can be beneficial for learners with visual impairments for several reasons:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Learning to code can help visually-challenged learners develop critical thinking, logical thinking, problem-solving skills and such other skills, which can be useful in many aspects of life.

Career Opportunities: While our objective is not to make IT engineers out of every learner, our goal is to teach necessary 21st-century skills to ALL students. If any of the young learners would want to eventually pursue IT as a career, our ultimate goal is to help them build on their passion and provide a pathway since coding is a high-demand field with a lot of job opportunities. Students with vision challenges often face additional challenges in finding employment, and having coding skills can open up a range of job opportunities that may be more accessible and flexible. Again, the intent behind teaching coding skills is primarily to make such skills accessible to everyone and also to teach skills such as logical thinking, problem-solving and such other skills. 

Independence: Coding allows visually-impaired learners to create and develop their own software, tools, and applications. This independence can be empowering and lead to greater self-sufficiency. Many mainstream technologies are not fully accessible to people with visual impairments, and there is a need for more accessible technology. Coders with visual impairments can contribute to creating more inclusive and accessible technology for all.

Community: The coding community is diverse and inclusive. Coders with visual disabilities can connect with other coders who have similar experiences and learn from one another.

Our team comprises of members with Information Technology expertise, members with expertise in developing educational products for underserved, government (public) school-going students, members with experience and expertise in building physical coding kits that teach coding WITHOUT computers to poor students who otherwise do not have access to computers, members who have the drive to create positive impact in the society and have demonstrated by contributing in the space for nearly a decade amongst other members who have diverse skills in content development, designing assessments and so on.

However, at the start of the product development cycle, our team lacked prior experience in building tools in the accessibility space. To circumvent this shortcoming, we adopted a different path than we usually undertake while developing educational products.

Unlike our previous product development methods, we partnered with a school for the visually challenged and involved a few sets of students studying within the school very early in our product development life cycle. 

With prior permission from the school management, we approached the students and explained to them our idea/concept of building a product for them and their peers to learn foundational coding skills. It was heartening to see their amazing levels of enthusiasm and eagerness to participate in the program. After their initial questions were answered, the subtle suggestions given by the students while testing out new features of the product have been unbelievable. In all, we used an iterative method from design to develop to test with actual users (in our case, students from the school) and have built a product that has already undergone several iterations of testing (material, usability etc..).

Our combined expertise, our strong intent and work in the social impact space over the past decade, and our newer product development approach has positioned us well towards delivering an innovative, appropriate, much-needed and accessible solution to young learners with visual impairments all around the world.

Our first product, ProGame - Coding WITHOUT Computers that solves the problem of inaccessibility of Computers to underserved, government (public) school going students in India and other developing countries, is in the growth phase. We are partnering with several national and international organizations in taking our solution to poor students studying in remote, public schools. 

On the other hand, with ProGame Tactile we have conducted our first few workshops using our solution. We are piloting it within smaller groups first so that the feedback from the students can be incorporated back into the solution before it can be launched globally for learners across the world to access. 

A couple of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) teams that we presented our solution to, readily volunteered to partner with us. We are working on a collaboration model wherein not just this solution, but a complete pathway can be created for interested visually-challenged students to take up IT as a career.

Solve provides an unparallel platform for social entrepreneurs in their social impact journey. From providing access to fellow social entrepreneurs to providing access to mentors from all around the world, huge networking opportunities open up. This is important for every social impact worker out there because mostly impact work cannot happen in isolation.

The newer space that we have started to work in, accessibility space, needs a lot of support from bigger organizations who are already in this space. Conversations with such organizations and eventual connects with them can happen via Solve. This is significant because a lot of work can be done in this space via collaboration from across the world than in silos.

Further, access to grants can go a long way in providing support in the long product development phases which are mostly unconventional. Thus far, despite being a social startup, we have spent significant amount of resources in material testing, discovering printing techniques, usability and such.

Also, fine tuning of our business models, approach and overall direction can happen during the virtual support program through interactions with coaches and peers.

There are not too many solutions in the market that can teach foundational coding skills to visually-challenged students; this in itself underscores challenges that lie in developing such a solution.

Our solution is a phygital product which includes a physical kit as well as a mobile app. Another version of the solution, where the physical kit may not be needed is also under the works. 

Our phygital solution includes a coding kit that includes blocks of instructions/code, backdrops and sprites (as in MIT Scratch) as physical blocks. Each of these blocks have markings engraved in Braille and English. To further assist identification of the physical blocks by a student who is visually challenged, there engravings of appropriate symbols on the blocks. For example, a cat sprite will have an outline of a cat engraved on the block. Blocks are coded as well for easy identification by the users. 

By including a physical kit, visually-challenged students can touch and feel blocks of code, engage with them and work with a gesture & QR code enabled app that can guide them through the learning process in easy-to-understand steps.

Visually-challenged learners can use our kit to learn computational thinking skills that can build stronger logical thinking, problem solving and such other skills within them which in turn can help in various aspects of life apart from leading them to pursue better career opportunities in life.

We intend to train 50,000 visually-challenged students in computational thinking skills by end of 2026.

ProGame Tactile is a combination of a physical coding kit and a mobile app. The physical coding kit is made of cardboard/recycled plastic blocks with Braille and English instructions embossed on them. Also included on the blocks are QR codes for the mobile app to recognize whenever the user shows it to the App. Also, engraved on the blocks are codes (in single letters) that indicate which group the block belongs to. For example, an event block would have "E" printed on it. Similarly, a motion coding block such as "move - steps" block shall have "M" printed on it. Also, the blocks, sprites and backdrops are arranged in such a way, using a ring, that picking up a ring of blocks shall indicate a certain group of physical blocks, be it coding blocks, sprites or backdrops. For example, if a user has to use a sprite block, he could look for codes on the physical blocks and specifically search for the code "S" which indicates Sprites. He or she then picks up the ring of sprites and then starts looking for a specific sprite he or she is interested in. The search for the specific sprite can happen by reading Braille or English engraved on the block or through shapes that are engraved on the blocks. For example, a cat sprite block shall have the engraving of a cat on the block for users who cannot read either Braille or English.

The mobile app is a Native Android (Java) application designed to empower visually-impaired students in learning block programming language such as MIT's Scratch. Using on-device machine learning algorithms for Gesture Recognition, users can easily interact with the app using gestures. QR detection further enhances their experience by recognizing various programming components like backdrops, sprites and blocks. The JavaScript-based blocks compiler processes blocks of code for execution. By seamlessly integrating Gesture Recognition, QR technology, and a compiler, ProGame Tactile creates an easily accessible tool and brings confidence for visually challenged individuals in coding.

We are a total of 19 people within our company including 8 interns. A total of 7 people are currently working on this solution. Five of them full-time employees and two interns.

We have been working on this solution for a little over a year.

There is 50% Gender diversity amongst the founders. It has always been the highest priority of the founders to be sensitive to the needs of the team. Also, special care is taken during the recruitment process in conducting a free and fair screening and selection of candidates. Out of the current team of 19 people from different religious communities, 6 are women.

We DO NOT discriminate based on religion, race, gender, color, caste, creed, socio-economic status, etc. while hiring and selecting a person.

While the end-users of our solution would be young learners who are visually challenged, our paying customers shall be parents of such students and/or  institutions for the visually challenged. We intend to continue our model of reaching out to students through Government departments, NGOs, Foundations, Schools and Corporate Social Responsibility Teams. 

The institutions (B2B model) can either setup digital labs on their own and purchase our kits from us or in the absence of a digital lab, we could enable the setting up of the entire lab for the institutions. 

For home users (B2C model), the coding kit can be purchased and used at homes on their own devices.

One of the primary reasons why there aren't too many commercial solutions in the accessibility space, in our opinion, is because more often than not the solutions aren't commercially viable on their own. Quite a few good ideas do not get converted into products and solutions in the accessibility space because they cannot be made commercially viable. 

In such a context where a product in the accessibility space cannot be pursed on its own, we believe, by producing multiple products catering to different demographics, its makes it viable to innovate and build solutions around it.

Our product, ProGame Tactile, is in the piloting phase after more than year's of research and development around this. We are able to sustain primarily because we are generating revenues with our other products that are already in the market catering to a complete different set of users (underserved students studying in government (public) schools).