Excerpt from the SC School for the Deaf and the Blind newsletter:
A dozen middle and high school students in the School for the Blind took a computer-based science learning system in development out for a spin! A research team from North Carolina State University, on be-half of Dr. CS Nam, working on a grant from the National Science Foundation, came to campus Feb. 13-14.
The system will be different from others in that it will use ‘haptic feedback’, meaning it allows students to actually feel objects in a virtual computer environment. The developers hope to improve science learning for students by combining the versatility of computers with the power of learning by touch. Students were able to try out the haptic controller! One study was about object referencing and used a toy car; another was about object detection.
Preston Lewis coordinated the research studies at SCSDB with Brendan Corbett, master’s student in Ergonomics and Human Factors at NCSU’s Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. Brendan said that Preston and the students contributed a tremendous amount to their research.