[Nfbk] Math and science access for blind students - free session in Louisville on October 12

[Noble,Stephen L.]

[Apologies if you receive this announcement more than once.]

Anyone is welcome to attend the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Consortium meeting. There is no need to pre-register for the STEM meeting and it is free and open to the public. It will be held in the Park Suite, which is on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Louisville (the APH conference hotel) on Thursday, October 12 at 10:00 AM. Full details are provided below.

-----
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Consortium Meeting
A Related Meeting to be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of Ex Officio Trustees and Special Guests of the American Printing House for the Blind, Inc. http://www.aph.org/annual-meeting-2017/

We would like to thank SeeWriteHear (formerly gh) for sponsoring the 2017 STEM Consortium Meeting. Please visit their website for more details on their products and services: http://www.seewritehear.com/  

October 12, 2017, 10:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Park Suite, Hyatt Regency Hotel, 311 South Fourth Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202

This meeting will feature a series of presentations on issues related to the development and delivery of accessible curricular  content in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas of the Core Curriculum.

The discussion panel will include some of the leading experts on STEM access from around the country:

* Rosanne Hoffman, Jeanette Wicker, and Ken Perry from the American Printing House for the Blind (APH). The latest update to the Submersible Audible Light Sensor (SALS) app and probe will be demonstrated. This will be followed by the latest updates on the Graphiti and Orbit Reader 20.

* Ed Summers from SAS. Building Quantitative Literacy with Accessible Charts and Graphs: This presentation will demonstrate free software that enables students with visual impairments or blindness to independently create, explore, and share graphical representations of data such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, scatter plots, bubble plots, box plots, and histograms.

* Dave Wilkinson from HIMS. BrailleSense Polaris provides easy and instant access to Nemeth and UEB math from within its word processor. Students can see math on the braille display, and hear it spoken correctly while a visual teacher can simultaneously see the mathematical symbols in their proper form on a visual display of that teacher's choosing.

* Dave Schleppenbach and Wunji Lau. SeeWriteHear (formerly GH) is researching the efficacy of 3D models and manipulatives vs 2D tactile graphics in chemistry education. Impacting students of all abilities, the project aims to develop methods to improve student understanding of orbitals and other difficult-to-grasp topics that serve as the foundation for many STEM careers. 

* Dan Gardner from ViewPlus. Combining tactile images with interactive text as audio allows blind students to be more self-sufficient in many STEM subjects.  He will demonstrate audio tactile arithmetic worksheets for generating addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems, plus show how blind students can explore chemical molecules, electronic circuits, and maps using audio tactile images.

* Jenna Gorlewicz and Corrine Mueller from ViTAL. This talk will present fundamental research and commercialization efforts on touchscreen-based, multisensory graphic representations. We will discuss ViTAL's software applications, the research studies that have supported it, and the potential impacts on students with blindness and visual impairments and their teachers. We will also present a demonstration of our software and discuss our latest pilot studies.
 
This session will be held in the Park Suite during the APH Annual Meeting on Thursday, October 12, from 10:00 am until 12:15 pm at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. This meeting is free and open to the public. There is no need to register for this meeting.

For more information contact the event organizer: Steve Noble, steve.noble at louisville.edu, 502-969-3088