What is the name of your organization?
uDot
What is the name of your solution?
uDot for STEM
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A touchscreen tactile interface with educational tools and content tailored to enable STEM learning of blind students
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
India
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
We are addressing the virtually non existent uptake of STEM by blind students. Globally, there are close to 2M blind children and another >2.5M children with multiple disabilities and visual impairment.
Some reasons for this is that 1000s of images(graphs,diagrams etc), spatial information cannot be consumed, drawn.
Specialized teachers are scarce and even if they are available it is a herculean task to teach students- engagement with students is majorly 1-1 and hands on leading to several repetitions and an impossibly high burden and slow pace.
From a bird's eye view, independent content access is missing, 1-many classroom models don't work, online content cannot be consumed , leaving the burden often to unequipped parents. In the midst of all this is a student, who is demotivated every time he/she has to wait for external help, a resource is missing or a topic is excluded because it might be too hard.
What is your solution?
We are building a touchscreen tactile display comprising around 4000 raisable dots that can refresh rapidly to display graphics, animations, braille, GUIs. This was made using our own novel microactuator technology. This hardware ,similar to a laptop will be used by a visually impaired student in key learning activities.
uDot has built educational tools that enable simultaneous 1-many, non hands on teaching in a blind as well as inclusive classroom. These tools uniquely bring down the required skillset to teach a blind student and through novel content representation techniques have significantly reduced the cognitive burden of a student when learning these concepts. Students will also be able to independently access online learning modules, games tailored to their curriculum, motivation and cognitive ease .
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
We are building for blind students in middle and high school who study in an inclusive setup or a blind school. We initially do have prerequisites like tech adoption, basic literacy and STEM attempts within these broad target groups. A typical blind student in an inclusive setup usually has to sit through lessons for sighted students taking away very little as they don't understand what the teacher is drawing on the blackboard, the textbook images and the way the teacher explains. After coming home, the student will be put into private tutoring or other efforts to make up for this gap. Even now the student is taught by untrained teachers resulting in complete hopelessness.
We only make it easier for non specialized teachers to teach a blind student, we remove the burden and skillset required to prepare 100s of tactile resources, we ensure that the 24/7 physical presence of a genius, dedicated teacher isn't required through dedicated modules, we keep the student motivated. We make blind classrooms work, where until now STEM learning had to be a 1-1 affair and have tested accessible blackboard solutions paired to the tactile display using which blind students and sighted students can study alongside.
