There has been significant progress in increasing the access to computing education for many K-12 students, including states adopting computer science (CS) standards and/or requiring CS courses. This includes the creation of block-based programming languages to make programming more accessible to younger students. Despite this progress, a new challenge has emerged: Students often struggle to transfer conceptual knowledge when transitioning to a new programming language (e.g., transitioning to a text-based programming after learning a block-based programming language). This poster presents the results of teacher interviews regarding the examples of knowledge transfer they observe in their classrooms. These interviews are part of an overarching project that aims to address the challenge of knowledge transfer between programming languages by developing a framework to support such transfer and deliver curricular supports that can be used to aid students’ productive knowledge transfer between programming languages. 
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                            Accessible Block-Based Programming for K-12 Students Who Are Blind or Low Vision
                        
                    
    
            Block-based programming applications, such as MIT’s Scratch and Blockly Games, are commonly used to teach K-12 students to code. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many K-12 students are attending online coding camps, which teach programming using these block-based applications. However, these applications are not accessible to the Blind/Low Vision (BLV) population since they neither produce audio output nor are screen reader accessible. In this paper, we describe a solution to make block-based programming accessible to BLV students using Google’s latest Keyboard Navigation and present its evaluation with four individuals who are BLV. We distill our findings as recommendations to developers who may want to make their Block-based programming application accessible to individuals who are BLV. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1842092
- PAR ID:
- 10302001
- Editor(s):
- Antona M., Stephanidis C.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human-Computer Interaction. Access to Media, Learning and Assistive Environments. HCII 2021
- Volume:
- 12769
- Issue:
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 52-61
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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