Where: Merchant Venturers Building, University of Bristol, BS18UB

When: 9am-7pm, Saturday 27th April 2019

About

The Inclusive Education Technologies Hackathon is a one day event bringing together programmers, designers, education specialists and pupils with and without visual impairment to hack and co-design the future of technologies for inclusive schools.

70% of children with visual impairments in the UK are educated alongside their sighted peers in mainstream schools rather than in special schools. But assistive technologies for learning are often designed to be used by visually impaired children and not by their sighted peers, which means that they are prone to learn in isolation.

• What if we designed education technologies that could be used by both visually impaired and sighted children?
• What would such technology be like?
• Can we create technology that enhance the inclusion of visually impaired children in mainstream schools?

Maybe we can use voice technology, like the Amazon Alexa and combine multisensory interaction, using audio, tactile, visual, and even smell feedback to make learning more engaging and inclusive of everyone!

Teams

Participation is open to students and non-student

• You will work in teams of 6, each team will have 2 programmers, 2 education specialists and 2 designers
• On the day, we will facilitate co-design sessions with visually impaired and sighted pupils and special education needs practitioners. You will be able to bounce off and test ideas with them throughout the day

Prizes Categories

• Theme 1: Group Learning build something to support whole class activities or small group activities, like peer revision or group experiments

• Theme 2: Multisensory Sensing Find a cool way to use multisensory interaction to augment a voice interface, like using vibration motors, bend sensors, or non-speech output

• Theme 3: Mobility in schools design a cool way to support blind navigation in schools using voice and multisensory feedback

Prizes

• 6 x Amazon Echo Dots!
• 6 x Sphero Mini Robots!
• 6 x Fitbits!

Tools

• Voice: Amazon Web Services
• Multisensory sensing: IoT platform using Raspberry Pi + Arduino and Microbit Kits
• We’ll be buying a few bits of kit for the day. Let us know if you have any specific requirements! We’ll try our best to help.

Sign Up

To register your interest, please send us email with two lines:

• One line about you and what excites you about participating in the hackathon
• One line about an idea for one of the hackathon themes; what would you build?
  • ***Please put “inclusive hackathon” as a subject