SBIR Phase II: An Accessible Platform for Engaging Children with Motor Impairments in the Classroom Environment
This SBIR Phase II project focuses on developing an accessible educational platform that combines mobile interfaces and adaptive educational tablet applications (Apps) to support the needs of children with special needs. Tablet devices are known to provide an interactive experience that has revolutionized learning for children. Unfortunately, while these tablet devices are intuitive to utilize and easy for many children, those with disabilities are largely overlooked due to difficulties in effecting pinch-and-swipe gestures. This project thus addresses a direct need in our society by providing an integrated educational experience, focused on math education that addresses the diverse needs of children, while providing a solution for variations found in their disabilities. The contributions of this project include 1) the design of accessible math Apps usable by K-12 children with and without disabilities and 2) the design of apps that adapt educational content and provide feedback to parents and teachers based on real-time analytics. Given that there are over 93 million children worldwide living with a disability and, in the United States, children with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education, there is a large potential of making both a commercial, as well as a societal, impact in this space. This SBIR Phase II project addresses an unmet need by developing an innovative solution to enable children with motor disabilities access to mobile devices and Apps that could engage them fully into the educational system. This solution capitalizes on the availability of pervasive technologies by combining an accessible tablet interface and educational Apps that adapt to each child?s abilities in order to provide an accessible mobile solution. Tablet devices are known to provide an interactive experience that has revolutionized learning for children. Unfortunately, while these tablet devices are intuitive to utilize and easy for many children, those with motor limitations tend to have difficulties due to the fine motor skills required for interaction. As such, to address the growing utilization of tablets in the classroom environment, the specific research objectives of this effort include the design of methods that enable the embedding of educational math content into accessible tablet apps for training and evaluating cognitive skills, the design of methods that enable adaptation of the educational content based on real-time analysis of interaction data and correlated performance of the child, and the hosting of interactive design sessions with teachers, parents, and children to evaluate the usability of the system. less This SBIR Phase II project focuses on developing an accessible educational platform that combines mobile interfaces and adaptive educational tablet applications (Apps) to support the needs of children with special needs. Tablet devices are known to provide an interactive experience that has revolutionized learning for children. Unfortunately, while these tablet devices are intuitive to utilize and easy for many children, those with disabilities are largely overlooked due to difficulties in effecting pinch-and-swipe gestur... more
At the present time, we have a need for a postdoctoral scholar to explore the design of an educational robotic platform that intelligently interacts with children to support their learning needs while using adaptive educational tablet applications (Apps). We incorporate a variety of approaches to study this question, such as human-robot interaction methods, emotion recognition, learning from observation, and learning analytics. We are looking for passionate engineers and computer scientists with a strong background in algorithms, machine learning or robotics.
Desired Skills • Strong coding skills in one or more of the following languages: C, C++, C#, Python, Java • Familiarity with microprocessors such as Arduino, raspberry PI • Experience in building or designing intelligent agents • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related field About Us Zyrobotics LLC, an award-winning creator of educational technologies for children, was founded in 2013 as an inclusive technology company. We address the diverse needs of children with differing abilities by developing personalized technologies to make a difference in the lives of children between the ages of 3- to 12-years old. Our mission is to enable freedom through technology by developing products that are adaptive to each child’s capabilities and focus on promoting the stimulation of social, cognitive, and motor skills development in a child.
Contact Contact: Dr. J. MacCalla Email: jmaccalla@zyrobotics.com Phone: 678-952-9976 Website: https://www.zyrobotics.com
