MK-III-LR Weather Station Part of Groundbreaking Project for Visually Impaired students in Kenya
Product Used: MK-III-LR
Research team members, Dr. Bruce Walker, Dr. Carrie Bruce, and Ms. Brianna Tomlinson (HCC Ph.D. student), from Walker’s Sonification Lab, visited partners in Kenya to continue work on the Mwangaza Project. This project is a collaboration among the Sonification Lab, inABLE, and Kenyatta University in Nairobi to investigate, develop, and deploy accessible STEM education resources for students with vision impairment at schools in Kenya. This latest research trip focused on setting up a digital weather station at the Thika School in coordination with Weather Underground and Rainwise, meeting with faculty and students from the Special Needs Education Department at Kenyatta, and discussing STEM and technology issues with teachers and students at the Thika School. "While we were at the school," Dr. Carrie Bruce said, " we spoke with science teachers to discuss the use of the weather station and learn about how they currently teach weather concepts. The discussion was very interesting, and we were able to get them to think about how certain weather features could be sonified or have associated sounds. Our next step is to begin work on making the web interface or a custom UI accessible (screen reader compatible and options for sonified graphs and tables).
