Math Melodies: Supporting Visually Impaired Primary School Students in Learning Math

For children with visual impairments, learning mathematics entails significant difficulties. This is partially due to the fact that both traditional and digital didactic tools for teaching mathematics to children often integrate visual elements into explanations and exercises in order to improve children's engagement and comprehension. These visual elements, however, are not accessible to students with visual impairments. Approaches that substitute visual information with audio or haptic stimulation exist, but they incur in several problems, including the need of a supervisor or expensive specialized hardware. To address this issue, we propose Math Melodies, a didactic software for the teaching of mathematics to primary school children. The application is freely available for iPad devices, and it presents 19 different exercise types, each with multiple levels of difficulty. The exercises are immersed within an adventurous story organized into 10 chapters. Math Melodies enables exploration of audio-visual elements on a touchscreen and provides multi-modal feedback that entertains and engages both visually impaired and sighted children simultaneously.