Low-cost Curriculum for the Blind

IDEAS Competition Final Proposal

Team Members:
Sara Minkara – sminkara@mit.edu
Lana Awad – lanaawad@mit.edu
Yoojin Chung – yshung1@mit.edu
Vanessa Zhang – vzhang@mit.edu (Primary contact)
Nina Jreige – ninus@mit.edu
John Yazbek – johnyaz@mit.edu
Noor Doukmak - noor@mit.edu

Project Summary:

Integration of the blind community is a largely overlooked problem in many developing

countries. Especially among blind children of school-going age, the social stigma is that their
disability will make it impossible for them to excel academically and socially. Add to this the
sore lack of resources and prohibitively high prices of assistive technology, and it is not hard to
understand why these children are discouraged from going to school. Few of those that do
manage to enter to formal education system go on to pursue higher-level education or enter fields
like mathematics and sciences. Therefore, there is an urgent need for science and mathematics
curricula that are accessible to both blind and sighted children, as well as inexpensive
alternatives to the high-tech teaching aids that use affordable, available and accessible materials
in developing countries.

Our project aims to develop such a curriculum, complete with instructions for teachers and
parents on how to transform everyday items into teaching aids for the blind. The curriculum and
teaching aids will be specific for children of elementary and middle school age, when skills
acquisition is at its peak. This will level the playing ground for blind children and integrate them
with their sighted counterparts. In addition to keeping material costs to a minimum, the
curriculum will also be designed to be easily adapted and widely circulated, so that children who
cannot go to school can also benefit, and teachers or parents with valuable experiences to share
can also add to the ever-growing store of knowledge.

Description of the problem:

Over 300 million people in the world have visual impairments, and nearly 90% of them live in
developing countries. This project will start with a pilot in Lebanon, a low-income country where
financial restrictions and cultural stigmas have excluded visually impaired children from society.

Geographically situated in an area of political and economic tension and faced with its own
internal instability, the Lebanese government has been unable to provide support for
marginalized sectors of its population. Care for the disabled is thus left to family members and
charity organizations. Charity organizations founded in Lebanon, however, too often reinforce
the cultural norm that disabled people are dependent outliers, further perpetuating the widespread
belief that the disabled are unable to contribute to their communities. One example of this was
encountered by our team while conducting preliminary research for this project last summer:
During an interview with the principal of a charity-run school for the blind, we were explicitly
told that the school discourages blind students from pursuing science and math skills because
they are unlikely to attend university in the future and pursue science or engineering careers.

Doubt in blind students’ ability to understand the material is one reason behind this attitude,
while the extra cost of materials that are specially created for blind students is another huge
hindrance.

However, the growing body of scientific literature on the learning habits of blind children shows
that, due to necessity, many blind children have excellent memory, and an acute sense of
hearing and of touch. This enables them to master scientific and mathematical materials just as
easily as their sighted counterparts. In addition, sighted students who engage their other senses
during the learning process are also found to be more effective learners.

In light of this, we want to create a set of curriculum that can play up these advantages that
visually impaired students have, but which can still be taught to blind and sighted children
simultaneously. The focus will be on making the curriculum flexible, so that they can be
implemented in schools and at home, and also at little to no additional cost compared to the
widely available materials available to sighted students. The curriculum will be focused on two
things:
Teaching methods and materials
Instructions for making learning aids from the blind using everyday objects without extra cost.
Examples include carving dents into rulers and protractors. Science tools for the blind
currently exist but are very expensive and are not accessible to blind students in
developing countries.

Community to be served:

Our focus will initially be on the blind children in Lebanon. Through our community partners,
we will have access to children from local blind schools of different religious backgrounds, blind
children from Palestinian refugee camps in the country, as well as blind children from rural
villages.

Our hope is that the tools and curriculum will eventually be spread out to all schools and
communities in Lebanon, as a resource that is available to any teacher or parent in the charge of
a blind student. After demonstrating the success of the tools and curriculum in Lebanon we hope
to expand and tailor them to other countries. This way, blind children across developing
countries who do not have easy access to the technologies that are available in the developed
world will still be able to learn math and sciences in school and at home without worrying about
incurring additional costs to their parents. This way of integrating them into the education system
will not only empower them years into the future, but will also have the positive spillover effects
of raising awareness for the need to integrate other disabled communities into the society.
Explanation of the innovative aspects of the project:

1 - Cost:
Since the prohibitively high cost of assistive teaching materials for blind children is a major
factor that prevents these children from obtaining an education, our collection of low cost
materials will help to reduce this barrier. The curriculum will include detailed but easy-to-
understand ‘build-it’, ‘teach-it’ as well as ‘expand-it’ instructions. While this may not require
much rocket science to design and implement, this is still an unexplored field that needs much
more attention and development.

2- Open source:
By making the materials available (through libraries, on the internet and other teaching resource
centers), teachers will hopefully be able to contribute to the collection of materials and
curriculum with their own insights, innovations and suggestions for improvements and
expansions.

3- Sustainability of project:
When we enter the stages of testing and disseminating, the hope is to be able to include
governmental educational agencies that will be able to implement the curriculum on a larger
scale by incorporating the core elements into their education guides. This will help to ensure
long-term sustainability of the project.

4- Integration:
This project will help integrate blind students into the mainstream society by engaging sighted
students in the same curriculum. Many technologies or curriculum for blind children are
designed such that they cater specifically to the blind children, and are usually only implemented
on an individual level. This creates a mental boundary in the mind of blind as well as sighted
children, making them think that they cannot learn under the same conditions. By creating a
curriculum that is accessible to blind and sighted children alike, we hope to literally level the
playing ground and plant the first seeds of integration in the minds of these children.

Community Partners:

Main Community Partner: Empowerment Through Integration (ETI)

Contact person: Sarah Chang, Chief Operating Officer, schang@eti-vision.org
Empowerment Through Integration provides programs that help visually impaired students
become integrated members of their society. ETI offers summer camps where blind and sighted
children come together to enjoy educational and recreational activities. These camps are unique
in that they gather both blind and sighted children to participate in all of the camp activities, from
classes to sports to physical education activities and field trips. This helps both groups of
children to learn to communicate with each other, and get a better perspective of the other’s
needs and ways of social interaction. For our visually-impaired campers, the program teaches
skills to build self-confidence and self-sufficiency, such as navigational skills and assistive
technologies. All students are taught essential math and science skills. In addition, ETI provides
resource libraries containing necessary assistive technologies, and advocates for job
opportunities and disability rights with the government and corporate sectors.
Perkins School for the Blind:
Contact person: Cafer Barkus, Program Supervisor, Cafer.Barkus@Perkins.org
The Perkins School for the Blind was founded in 1829, and has been teaching blind students for
over a century. We will work with the Perkins School to observe how teachers adapt theirs
classes to suit the needs of blind children and to learn more about the technologies that are
needed to conduct math and science classes. With the guide of the Perkins School, we will take
the standard math and science curriculum used by the Massachusetts state government and create
lessons plans that can be used for both sighted and blind children.

Feasibility

Implementation plan:

- Examine a collection of math and science curricula for elementary and middle school children,
focusing on those from Lebanon and Massachusetts.
- Choose the materials that are needed to teach each section, paying special attention to the
potential of incorporating more then one sensory organ in the activities.
- Collect information on the prices of teaching materials that are available in Lebanon (both in
urban and rural areas), ranging from basic materials for students in general, to specialized tools
meant for blind children.
- Examine the teaching objectives alongside the available teaching materials to see if the
materials can be adapted, using locally available resources, for blind children to use.
- Test instructions manual on how to make the required materials. (see How to measure Success)
- Implement the core sections of the curriculum in the summer camps held by ETI.
- Continue communicating with the local blind schools and other elementary and middle schools
to implement a longer-term execution of the curriculum. By tapping into the local networks of
our Community Partner, we also hope to be able to introduce the curriculum into local
educational agencies.

How to measure Success:

Testing the lesson plans
We have obtained permission from our main community partner, ETI, to test the lesson plans
during their summer camps. Using an econometrics approach, we will divide the children into
“Treatment” and “Control” groups, where students in the treatment group will be taught using
our lesson plans, while students in the control group will be taught using lesson plans from
mainstream schools in Lebanon. Comparing results from a series of tests and observations done
before and after the summer camps, we will be able to quantify the effects of our lesson plans
compared to those in mainstream schools. Lesson plans will be considered successful if learning
outcomes improve for the blind students, without causing a fall in learning outcomes for the
sighted children.
Testing the instruction manual for making equipments:
In order to ensure that the instruction manual is easy to follow, we will invite teachers and
parents of blind children in both Lebanon and America to try building the equipment following
our instructions (in Arabic and English respectively), and using materials which are available to
them locally. Reflections and suggestions for improvement will be incorporated into the manual.

Challenges:
Cultural Sensitivity: We are creating a template lesson plan for math and science that could be
implemented in any community. However, there are certain lessons that might be inappropriate
in certain societies. Thus, every time the lesson plans are adopted by another country, we need
to be careful that there aren’t any aspects of the lesson plans that are offensive to them. We plan
to deal with this challenge by keeping a centralized online source for our lesson plan, that
different communities can choose to adopt completely or partially, and can thus decide which
parts suit them better.
Translation into different languages: part of scaling up would be to be able to make this lesson
plan reach a large number of blind communities all over the developing world, and that will
require translation into different languages. We anticipate that this task will be done by volunteer
students in different communities that choose to adopt the curriculum. Yet, there are issues with
the quality of translation, and we will probably not be able to control that.
Pace of class with blind and sighted children: While we provide the blind students with
accommodations that allow them to follow up with the class, we realize that adopting these
learning aids we are suggesting might slow the teacher down, and might slow the overall pace of
the class, which might make sighted students impatient, and negatively affect their learning
experience. We hope that the aids are built before hand, and don’t take up class time.
Global Level of math and science: The level of the math and science programs in different
countries might vary significantly, so an introductory level lesson plan might be sufficient in
some countries to prepare blind students to integrate into regular school level, but in some other
countries, the program might be too basic.



Timeline:




 Budget:
Budget (4/15/2011 through 8/15/2011)
Item Estimated Cost*
Raw materials for learning aid construction in the US $ 200
Ex. Cardboard, scissors….
Raw materials for learning aid construction in $100
Lebanon
Incentive for parents and teachers in the US to try $10 or $15 per participant for 10 participants
constructing our learning aids ( first test of feasibility $150
for the lesson plans)
Cost of lesson plans translation into Arabic for the $100
pilot camp in Lebanon
Travel budget for 2 team members to Lebanon to help $2000
camp teachers set up and run the test

*The estimates are rather rough, because we haven’t decided which technologies are best to
incorporate in the curriculum. We still need to try constructing them from raw materials and that
will make our cost estimates more precise.
Camp maintenance costs are provided by our community partner ETI

Team Members:

Sara Minkara is a Lebanese American and has been legally blind since she was 7 years old. A
senior in mathematics and economics who returns to Lebanon each summer, Sara always
dreamed of bringing back the tools and skills she learns in the US to the children in Lebanon.
She started Camp Rafiqi, a summer camp for blind children, in Tripoli in 2009 and has since
expended this into a Boston-based non-profit organization that focuses on continuing and
spreading these camps to other developing countries. Her familiarity with the local blind culture
is essential in directing and shaping this project.

Lana Awad is a senior in biological engineering. She minors in applied international studies and
political science and is very interested in working on global health problems. She co-founded an
IDEAS initiative in 2009 to alleviate malnourishment problems. She was also the lead organizer
of the Arab Admissions Mentorship Program, which aims to help students in the Arab world get
better higher education. She will be helping with setting up the pilot and translating the
curriculum into Arabic.

Vanessa Zhang is a senior in mathematics and economics. She has a strong passion for working
with children and has volunteered with children and disabled adults on a long-term basis. Her
primary focus will be in developing the math curriculum.

John Yazbek is a sophomore studying chemical and biological engineering. He was born and
raised in Lebanon and came to the US two years ago to study at MIT. While in Lebanon, he was
a volunteer medic in the Lebanese Red Cross. Through his experiences, he has noticed the needs
of many people in developing countries can be largely overlooked and that little is being done to
change that. He believes our idea is a great chance to induce major changes in the lives of blind
people in developing countries.

Nina Jreige is a sophomore at MIT majoring in biological engineering. Since high school, she
has enjoyed tutoring and aiding younger students. She will be working on designing and testing
educational tools using cost-effective materials to be used in the math and science curricula.

Noor Doukmak is a freshman majoring in mathematics with a strong interest in education. She
has enjoyed tutoring students in the areas of math and science in the past, and she hopes to
continue to be involved in math instruction in the future. Her work on developing the team’s
math curriculum incorporates her enthusiasm for math education and instruction.

Yoojin Chung is a senior in architecture, minoring in art history. She has always been keenly
interested in working with children, and she has teaching experiences with children in various
settings outside of school. She has been involved in developing one-on-one home schooling
curricula for children with disabilities. Her interest in designing art that engages all of the senses
will provide the backbone of the curriculum. She will also be helping develop the program for
the camp instructors' training.