Virtual Summer Camp for High School Students with Disabilities - An Experience Report

Abstract

In the past years, the authors held computer programming and machine learning summer camp for high-school students with disabilities. Due to the pandemic, the summer camp was offered virtually in 2020 and 2021. This paper reports our experience of teaching this summer camp. The main goal of the summer camp was to let students with disabilities get first-hand experience of working in STEM fields to encourage them to pursue STEM careers. The curriculum was primarily composed of hands-on activities for Python programming and Computer Vision. Besides lectures and programming tasks, there were also guest speakers and an external panel to offer their personal experiences of working in STEM fields. Students enrolled had disabilities including Autism, learning disability, vision impairments, and blindness. The summer camp was successful, and all students were able to finish all programming tasks. Special accommodations and adjustments were necessary, especially in the curriculum, schedule, teaching practices, and the involvement of special educators. The overall effort to make these adjustments was not extremely high. However, we did observe accessibility issues for the student with blindness. Overall, our experience shows that online programming camps for high-school students with disabilities are feasible, and students with disabilities can potentially be successful Computer Science professionals.