Application of RFID Technology to Create Inclusive Educational Resources

Abstract

Educational inclusion is a growing challenge faced by the various educational systems in the world. Providing quality education to students who encounter barriers due to physical, cognitive, or psychosocial disabilities is a major stumbling block, according to the Sustainable Development Goals.

In the Latin American context, a current area of opportunity is the shortage of didactic resources to support inclusive education for the teaching-learning process of elementary school children. Nevertheless, these resources must be low-cost, engaging, and universally accessible to all students. The use of technology facilitates autonomy and independence during the interaction of students with learning objects and is highly attractive for youth who nowadays are technology natives; then, incorporating technological elements to inclusive didactic resources is a must in today’s classrooms.

Previously, we have reported the use of an academic makerspace to promote the involvement of students of engineering and other disciplines in the development of technology-based inclusive didactic resources upon the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The project initially focused on inclusion for visually impaired students and eventually derived into a continuous social service program called Edumakers for inclusion, which currently extends to three campuses of Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. This program relies on the multi-disciplinary nature of the collaboration between students, which enriches the generation of ideas, development, and final products.

This paper reports on the incorporation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to create tactile 3D-printed representations of scientific concepts in the form of didactic resources. Using this technology, an RFID reading system was built to identify and respond to specific NFC tags, triggering the reproduction of pre-loaded audio with information about the object to which the tag is attached. To show the incorporation of this concept, we present two examples of the didactic resources we have produced with the RFID technology. They consist of three-dimensional representation of maps of Mexico and the human body’s internal organs. Organs were 3D-printed from curated files found in open-source 3D model repositories, using criteria such as scientific accuracy and appropriateness for educational purposes at the elementary school level. Audios describing the organ’s structure and functioning were elaborated for each organ. Each piece of the featured organs possesses an NFC tag that, when the organ is approximated to the RFID reader, signals the reproduction of the audio.

This material sets an example of how the technological basis of RFID allows the generation of a structural set of materials of inclusive nature. In this case, it was applied to elementary school topics, but it can extend to any other subject of varied areas of knowledge. The resulting products can be engaging for any student while they are also accessible to visually impaired users, facilitating teacher’s work. But furthermore, their characteristics also help envisioning a new format of teaching intervention that permits decentralization of the teacher and gives way to more autonomy for students with disabilities. In the near future, as more didactic resources of this type are produced and inserted in UDL-designed didactic sequences, it will be possible to see their effects toward reaching the education goals for all.