Educational tool kits for basic traditional Thai dancing for learners with visual impairment

Abstract

AbstractWith the ever-evolving world, means of education have developed through multimedia and internet, allowing learners to learn more effectively, with more reach and less boundaries. Thailand, as one of the developing countries, has also been evolving its education systems through multimedia teachings while incorporating online media. However, the visually impaired group of learners fell behind especially in traditional Thai dancing lessons, which require contact-based cues from instructors. The gap widened as the COVID-19 situation prohibits physical touches, making some group of Thai students with visual impairment falling behind in traditional Thai dancing classes. In this work, a learning toolkit, comprising microcontroller and 3D-scanned media, was developed and used to enhance the learning efficiency of traditional Thai dancing in a visually impaired group of learners. The control group demonstrated 27.4% and 193.3% improvement between pre-test and post-test scores in theoretical multiple-choice tests and practical performance tests, respectively. Through the ANOVA and T-score analysis, statistically significant improvements were confirmed in the experimental group. This work has demonstrated that our developed toolkit can be used to teach students with visual impairment in mid-high school range of age without prior visual cues.

Keywords

• Traditional Thai Dance
• microcontroller
• 3D printing
• visually impaired
• audiobook
• multimodal