Eight students from Carnegie Mellon University are conducting technology research projects in India to benefit the visually impaired. They were selected for the 2013 iSTEP (innovative Student Technology ExPerience) internship and will spend the summer in Bangalore, India, engaging in various researches.
iSTEP is a unique summer research internship programme that provides the opportunity to conduct technology research projects in underserved communities around the world. The 2013 team is working on several projects that support blind students who are learning to write in Braille. They are further developing the software device connected to a computer that allows blind students to learn the placement of different dots in a Braille cell.
Aveed Sheikh, a business administration student at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and his fellow Pittsburgh teammates, Madeleine Clute, Maddie Gioffre, Poornima Kaniarasu, Aditya Kodkany, Vivek Nair, Shree Lakshmi Rao and Avia Weinstein, are the students who are working in India in partnership with Mathru Educational Trust for the Blind.
“It is a wonderful learning experience to work with a multi-talented international CMU team to make a positive difference,” said Aveed Sheikh.
Mathru Educational Trust for the Blind includes Mathru School for the Blind, which is a non-profit and voluntary institution founded in 2001 to educate and rehabilitate visually impaired children and adults. In 2011, the trust launched a new centre, educating children who are deaf or have multiple disabilities.
“Mathru is an inspirational partner; we have relished working with the staff dedicated to teaching differently-abled students,” said Rao, an iSTEP intern.
Blind students can also learn to write in Braille through different games and exercise using a slate and stylus. The device provides instant audio feedback based on the user’s input and also corrects mistakes. The interns are working on enhancing existing modes on the Braille Writing Tutor software by introducing Kannada (local language) and Hindi Braille, in addition to math.
Other than software development, the students have been working with the trust to conduct interviews, user experience tests and analyse data to fully understand the technology’s impact.
“Interacting directly with the staff and students at Mathru has helped me better learn and understand various perspectives. Everyone here has a unique life story to tell, which makes my work even more interesting,” said Sheikh.
The interns will assess the needs of the new multi-disability centre and hand over the results to the iSTEP 2014 team, which is planning to return to Bangalore next summer to work with Mathru Educational Trust on new projects. iSTEP was created in 2009 by CMU research group TechBridgeWorld and is designed to give interns real-world experiences.
Some of the students participating in the programme.
