by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, CNET news.com
For the blind and visually impaired, it can be nearly impossible to follow along when a math teacher spends most of a lecture in front of a blackboard or projector drawing shapes, parabolas, X-Y planes, and other visuals. It’s about time there’s an app for that, thought mechanical engineering grad student Jenna Gorlewicz, who’d spent a few years at Vanderbilt’s Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory miniaturizing endoscopic robotic capsules and was looking for a more people-oriented project. So Gorlewicz, who says she loves both teaching and math, set out 18 months ago to try to develop a tablet app that uses haptic (or tactile) technology to help the visually impaired learn math and other subjects with a strong visual component. Using a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which can generate hundreds of different sounds and vibrations with various frequencies, Gorlewicz was able to assign different tactile queues for different features. On an X-Y grid, for example, she was able to set the horizontal and vertical lines to vibrate differently, and then set points on the grid to generate certain tones.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-57392568-247/haptic-app-helps-visually-impaired-learn-math/
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