2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Co-design is an important approach for engaging communities as equal partners with power to define design directions and make design decisions at every stage. This approach has proven valuable for disability inclusion by centering lived experiences with disability in accessible design endeavors. Furthermore, co-design has been adopted in engineering education research, from developing science museum activities with students to supporting engineering faculty professional development. Our recent research explored the co-design of an accessible engineering education tool through a community partnership with a nonprofit that serves the blind and low-vision (BLV) community in Northern California. Eight BLV community members collaborated with researchers at Stanford University, over 2.5 years, to co-design the first accessible electronic circuit simulator for BLV learners. BLV participants made core design decisions, including proposing multimodal features and a new tutorial, to iteratively shape the tool’s design. The research findings demonstrated how co-design ensures equitable power allocation among all co-designers – BLV participants and researchers alike – while fostering an authentic, inclusive design environment.

This paper extends those findings by investigating how co-designing the engineering education tool with BLV participants impacted their learning outcomes using the tool. Participant data were collected through surveys and observation notes of participants’ tool interactions. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory building approach and examined through the lenses of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning. The findings reveal multiple cognitive, metacognitive, and affective learning outcomes in participants’ tool experiences. Notably, several outcomes directly resulted from design decisions made by BLV participants during the co-design process. Thus, the impact of these decisions extended beyond accessibility objectives to support learning using the tool. Consequently, this work demonstrates that engaging community members with disabilities as co-designers of engineering education tools can enhance their learning outcomes across cognitive, metacognitive, and affective domains.