2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Accessible design is a critical part of engineering education and training, but is often neglected in early engineering experiences and relegated to graduate-level or elective classes at the university level due to curriculum pressure. Assistive technology design and principles, similarly, are rarely taught in elementary, secondary, or even undergraduate courses. However, the principles of assistive robotics are not complex—they are comprehensible to even the youngest students, and may be more interesting to female students than “classical” introductory robotics projects.
Our work is not the first to identify this connection and use assistive design to engage students, especially female students, in primary-school engineering curriculum. However, the majority of these curricula focus on a charity model of assistive technology, with a non-disabled engineer creating something for a disabled person (or sometimes animal) who is presumed to contribute little or nothing to the design or manufacturing process (and is typically not present and represented only via a user profile or needs analysis).
To this end, we propose a novel structure for introducing design principles for do-it-yourself assistive technology at the K-12 level through a co-curricular assistive robotics workshop. In our workshop, students (whether or not they identify as disabled) are simultaneously learning technical skills for building robots and about user-centered, DIY assistive design and accessibility. We conducted a study overlaid on a full-day instance of this workshop that we cohosted with a local Girl Scout organization. We present results from pre- and post-workshop surveys of the children and chaperones who attended, as well as from observations of the workshop activities. Our playful design workshop features open-ended, child-led projects designing assistive robotics for themselves, centering the idea of both assistive technology and assistive technology design as tools for empowering users of assistive technology.