Some Fantastic News for the Blind Programmer Community
- From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sodbeans <sodbeans-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Victoria.Wieldt@xxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:19:11 -0600
To the community
My co-investigator, Chris Hundhausen and I have been given the official word
from the National Science Foundation that our grant proposal to continue
work on tools for blind computer programmers is being recommended for
funding. This is excellent news, as it is a major government grant and will
inject a significant amount of capital into our team, both for development
and other research purposes. Once the capital is distributed, the following
will begin to happen:
1. We will be expanding our development team for both the Sodbeans and Sappy
projects.
2. Both Sappy and Sodbeans will be distributed to 5 schools for the blind
rolled out slowly over the next 3 years.
3. The participating schools for the blind will be teaching full courses on
computer programming to blind students using our tools.
4. We will be conducting a number of summer sessions at the Washington State
School for the Blind on how to use both Sappy and Sodbeans. A few select
members of the blind programming community that wrote letters for our grant
will be flown out to participate in these events and will act as mentors to
both the students and us.
5. We will be developing auditory video game libraries that allow blind
children to plug into an audio video game architecture, to help get them
interested in programming from a young age and, hopefully, providing them a
path toward college courses and employment.
And finally, I would like to express my deep thanks to both the blind
programmer community and to the extremely helpful folks out at Sun
Microsystems. Many of you have written letters of support for us, helped us
with the development of our software, given general advice to our research
team, helped us learn more about the NetBeans Platform, or have just lent us
an ear as we try to figure out some of the incredible technical challenges
involved with building custom compilers/debuggers/IDE's for the blind. I
can't thank you all enough for your support!
Now the fun begins,
Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
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