Development of App Inventor based Lab Components for Students with Disabilities

Abstract

Lab activities are critical for students who are taking introductory Computer Science courses. However, the traditional text based labs are difficult to be accessible for students with disabilities, especially for those who have specific learning disabilities or visually-impaired disabilities. According to the statistics provided by Raue, K. and Lewis, L., there are about 770,000 students with disabilities (SWD) enrolled in 2- and 4-year institutions. Making logic block based activities and laboratory materials available to SWD will allow them to fully understand the subject and increase their interest in introductory CS courses. The App Inventor is a tool that controls an app’s behavior and designs the way an App looks on smart phones and computers. Our project converts the text based lab activities to visual lab activities, making the text design of computer programming statements become setting up App blocks. It was hypothesized that App Inventor can be used to design lab components. The purpose of this research project was to implement the same topics of lab activities of regular programming statements with the App for SWD. Our experiments successfully devised two types of lab activities: the lab for scientific calculation, the lab for loop statements. The outcomes of our project fully develop accessible labs and learning materials. This will provide SWD an accessible experience and also provide uniquely designed learning tools based on their specialized needs in Computer Science courses.

Key words: App Inventor, Students with Disabilities, Visual lab, Programming statements, Setting up App blocks.