Using a tangible system to promote inclusive, collaborative activities to learn relational algebra for students with hearing impairment.

Educational resources and activities should be appropriate to the learning and development potential of each student, which is crucial when the student has some disability. For hearing impaired students (suffering hypoacusis), it is particularly important to exploit tactile and visual aids, as they access information and knowledge mainly through them, and this in a socially inclusive context. Tangible systems (where the users interact with the system by manipulating physical objects that represent functions or data of the system itself) offer a more natural, tactile interaction than other types of interfaces, and complements it with visual aids; besides, this kind of systems foster social interactions and collaboration. Tangible systems then have the features to be an adequate support for hearing impaired students. This has been investigated in the context of teaching basic skills to children and adolescents; however, there is a lack of studies regarding the use of tangible systems for teaching advanced concepts to university students. This paper reports an exploratory study which was conducted to gain insight into possible benefits and issues that might arise when a university learner with hypoacusis uses a tangible system (called TanQuery) for learning relational algebra, both in individual and in face-to-face collaborative settings. The results suggest that the use of the tangible system can place a student with profound hearing loss in equal conditions for learning tasks and promote his/her social integration, but that to fully achieve this the tangible system needs to incorporate advanced features, such as active objects and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]