Do you remember the first time you fell in love with science? It might have been a hands-on project tinkering around with electronics, the magic of chemical reactions in a lab or the dance of the cells under a microscope. Seeing is such an integral part of the science we do today.
Then what happens to visually impaired students? There are no brownie points for guessing that they are told they cannot do science. In India, blind students drop out of STEM after grade 7 and pursue vocational courses, simply because we do not have the infrastructure to enable blind students to do science.
I did not even realize how big of a problem this is until my friend (and favorite senior) Palli told me about a Student Design Challenge that was happening as a part of the EMPOWER 2022 Accessible Tech Conference. The problem statement for this challenge was to enable a blind student to pour out exact volumes of a liquid from one beaker to another. A sighted student does this by looking at the markings on the beaker.
My first instinct was to jump in and create some cool tech - robotic arms, AI based mobile apps and the likes. I then looped my tech-geek friend Akanksha into the project. Partha, a PhD student working on accessible tech also joined in. And we began brainstorming. We were super enthusiastic drawing out designs, writing out plans of action.
However, the bubble burst as soon as we visited a blind school in Goa. The school had bare minimum infrastructure. Their science lab was a shelf with 4 beakers, 5 test tubes and a few worn-out tactile models. The cool tech would not work here. We needed to start from scratch and make affordable stuff.
So we started reverse-engineering the process of pouring out a liquid in requisite volumes. The logical first step is to identify the container that has the liquid of interest. In order to help blind students do this, we worked out a braille label and got it 3-D printed. We then relied on sensors for volume detection - the student enters the liquid volume they want to pour out, and our device gives an indication when they are close to that value.
We named the device SAlly - short for science accessibility (A11y) and for science ally. And the name is so endearing (Malory Towers anyone?) that it just stuck. We tested out the device at a blind school, and in spite of it being a crude prototype the students loved it. They also had a lot of insightful feedback. In the process, I have been able to overcome a lot of my biases about blind people and the kind of inclusion we need.
Our project was selected for the final round of the Student Design Challenge - we went to IIT Madras to demo SAlly. We won the challenge and got some funding to continue the project.
It has been over 6 months since the design challenge, and we are now working on color detection in addition to volume measurement. We won the SuRa award for innovative student projects at BITS, got accepted into the Clinton Global Initiative University Fellowship program. Akanksha and SAlly travelled to the US for the CGIU inaugural conference (I am still a little salty about the less-than-a-year-old SAlly getting to travel so far before I did xD). Akanksha and I also recently did a podcast about our project.
The project has expanded beyond the device SAlly and now we are collaborating with an NGO called Vision Empower to study the existing science experiments in the school curriculum and use this understanding to build India's first accessible science lab. Our project is now formally instituted within the research group of Dr. Swaroop Joshi (who is hands-down the coolest prof at BITS Goa) and we are tackling this systemic issue one task at a time. I will probably not be at university to witness the completion of the science lab but I am sure that this is a project I will continue to support in whatever capacity I can as I move along. The people who are working on this project have become my closest friends and I am so grateful for the journey so far.
The future of STEM education is all about accessibility. And it's so exciting to be the torch-bearers of the future. If you would like to support the Accessible Labs project in any way do reach out to me.