Children with disabilities (CwDs) are among the most marginalized sections of India. Good quality access to early education and introduction to digital technologies empowers these children and prepares them for better opportunities for learning, education, and good careers. Many of these children go to special schools for CwDs where many of the teachers are also people with disabilities with limited technology awareness and access.
At MSR we, with support from CELA, have been working with children and teachers in schools for the blind over the past three years to create, train teachers, and to disseminate a play-based curriculum for computational thinking, under Project VICT. We have worked with NGOs and academic partners to reach nearly 100 schools across 5 states of India and have worked with nearly 1000 teachers, many of whom are also blind.
SEEDS, Scalable Early Education with Digital Scaffolding, is the next stage of this project aimed at empowering the children and teachers in these schools with digital devices that open the doors of the digital world to them. The end-user devices will range from basic mobile phones to smart feature phones to smartphones and smart speakers. The backend systems will take care of storage and delivery of accessible content to the children and teachers. These should be combined with a curriculum, teacher training, creation of relevant content, and the delivery of these solutions to special schools across the country.
The long-term vision of the project is to reach every one of the estimated 1–2 million children with vision impairments in India. However, the pilot will target to reach 200 children and 25 teachers over a 6-month period to iteratively design all aspects of the solution before we take on the scaling up challenges.