Tracking @stemxcomet: Teaching Programming to Blind Students via 3D Printing, Crisis Management, and Twitter

Introductory programming activities for students often include graphical user interfaces or other visual media that are inaccessible to students with visual impairments. Digital fabrication techniques such as 3D printing offer an opportunity for students to write programs that produce tactile objects, providing an accessible way of exploring program output. This paper describes the planning and execution of a four-day computer science education workshop in which blind and visually impaired students wrote Ruby programs to analyze data from Twitter regarding a fictional ecological crisis. Students then wrote code to produce accessible tactile visualizations of that data. This paper describes outcomes from our workshop and suggests future directions for integrating data analysis and 3D printing into programming instruction for blind students.