Despite being included in mainstream schools, visually impaired children still face barriers to social engagement and participation. Games could potentially help, but games that cater for both visually impaired and sighted players are scarce. We used a co-design approach to design and evaluate a robot-based educational game that could be inclusive of both visually impaired and sighted children in the context of mainstream education. We ran a focus group discussion with visual impairment educators to understand barriers to inclusive play. And then a series of co-design workshops to engage visually impaired and sighted children and educators in learning about robot technology and exploring its potential to support inclusive play experiences. We present design guidelines and an evaluation workshop of a game prototype, demonstrating group dynamics conducive to collaborative learning experiences, including shared goal setting/execution, closely coupled division of labour, and interaction symmetry.

Story mapping is used in schools to promote children's understanding of stories and narrative structure. As a collaborative activity, it can support creativity and facilitate group interaction. However, most techniques used in primary schools rely on visual materials, which creates a barrier to learning for children with visual impairments (VI). To address this, we set out to design a collaborative story mapping tool with a group of children with mixed visual abilities and their teaching assistants. Using co-design approaches over ten workshops, we designed and prototyped different ideas for engaging children in storytelling and design. We present our co-design process and findings, and the resulting story mapping system. We outline how using multisensory elements can facilitate creativity and collaboration to help children with mixed visual abilities create and share stories together, and support learning and social inclusion of VI children in mainstream classrooms.

There is increasing interest in multisensory experiences in HCI. However, little research considers how sensory modalities interact with each other and how this may impact interactive experiences. We investigate how children associate emotions with scents and 3D shapes. 14 participants (10-17yrs) completed crossmodal association tasks to attribute emotional characteristics to variants of the "Bouba/Kiki" stimuli, presented as 3D tangible models, in conjunction with lemon and vanilla scents. Our findings support pre-existing mappings between shapes and scents, and confirm the associations between the combination of angular shapes ("Kiki") and lemon scent with arousing emotion, and of round shapes ("Bouba") and vanilla scent with calming emotion. This extends prior work on crossmodal correspondences in terms of stimuli (3D as opposed to 2D shapes), sample (children), and conveyed content (emotions). We outline how these findings can contribute to designing more inclusive interactive multisensory technologies.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a co-design study with children with mixed visual abilities to create a multisensory joint storytelling platform. Storytelling is a valuable way for children to express their imagination and creativity, and can be used as tool for inclusive learning. Children with visual impairments are typically educated in mainstream schools, and often encounter barriers to learning, particularly in group settings. To address some of these issues, we have been working with a group of children with visual impairments, their Teaching Assistants (TAs), and sighted friends, to design and develop multisensory storytelling technologies. This paper presents the findings of the first five design sessions. We also present the outcomes and challenges of working with mixed stakeholder, mixed visual-ability groups in participatory design.

Children living with visual impairments (VIs) are increasingly educated in mainstream rather than special schools. But knowledge about the challenges they face in inclusive schooling environments and how to design technology to overcome them remains scarce. We report findings from a field study involving interviews and observations of educators and children with/without VIs in mainstream schools, in which we identified the "teaching assistant bubble" as a potential barrier to group learning, social play and independent mobility. We present co-design activities blending elements of future workshops, multisensory crafting, fictional inquiry and bodystorming, demonstrating that children with and without VIs can jointly lead design processes and explore design spaces reflective of mixed visual abilities and shared experiences. We extend previous research by characterising challenges and opportunities for improving inclusive education of children with VIs in mainstream schools, in terms of balancing assistance and independence, and reflect on the process and outcomes of co-designing with mixed-ability groups in this context.