News | Swaroop Joshi

Received ACM SIGCSE Special Projects Grant

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:22:30 +0530

I am glad to share that my project titled Serious Games for Teaching Accessibility was recently selected to receive the .

We are developing web-based serious games to teach digital accessibility concepts to computing students and software developers. We have developed two prototype games, A11YMythBuster and A11YBugHunter and tested them with 125 participants. Based on their feedback, following the Design-Based Research methodology, we will improve the games further and evaluate their impact on learning. The games are designed to help learners develop accessibility awareness and technical knowledge ( guidelines and ).

This grant will be used for game development, software licenses, and data collection. For more details, check out our project .

I thank Prof. Yolanda A. Rankin (Emory University), who coordinates the SIGCSE Special Projects program, for considering my proposal and the Review Committee for its valuable comments. I also thank my PhD advisee Parthasarathy PD and the undergraduate students who have worked/are working on this project.

Two of our papers accepted for ACM ICER'24!

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:09:29 +0530

Two of our research papers are accepted for the (ICER'24), to be held in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2024.

ICER is a CORE A conference and a prestigious Computing Education research community venue.

My PhD advisee, , will present the following papers at the conference:

MOU with NCISM on AI in ASUS Education

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 18:04:31 +0530

is a statutory body responsible for the education of the Indian System of Medicine disciplines (namely, Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, and Sowa-Rigpa, abbreviated ASUS). With the recent and ongoing developments in AI, they are interested in incorporating AI education in their institutes. Indeed, ASUS education has some unique challenges:

since India is the only country in the world where ASUS education exists in a well-structured manner, unlike other fields, there are no contemporary models for comparison in the rest of the world, and
it is equally important to preserve the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of this field in the era of fast-changing technologies.

BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa campus signed an MOU with NCISM on March 19, 2024. I am the principal investigator on this project.

The broader goals are:

Assessing the AI-preparedness of the current ASUS faculty and students,
Assessing the sector-specific needs for the creation of AI tools, and
Developing appropriate course content and pedagogies and assessing its impacts on student learning.

Two of our papers accepted for ICSE'24!

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:45:22 +0530

Two of our papers are accepted for the ICSE'24 conference’s Software Engineering Education and Training , to be held in Lisbon, Portugal in April, 2024.

The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) is a CORE A* conference, a flagship conference in software engineering.

Accessible Indian Bubbles: A Radio Show in New Zealand!

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 23:47:53 +0530

At the recent ACM conference at IIIT-Hyderabad, we met , one of the keynote speakers and a professor at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.

Otago Polytechnic is one of the southernmost universities in the world. They aim to have all their graduating students be able to “think and act as sustainability practitioners” irrespective of their areas of expertise. Sam has pioneered this program and has authored a book titled The Green Graduate on the same.

He also hosts a weekly radio show, Blowing Bubbles, on Otago Access Radio. After learning about , he invited us to record an episode for his show, which was broadcast on Dec 13.

We talked about teaching accessibility from various angles: what we are doing and why we are doing it, to whether accessibility should be taught in a separate course or be a part of all CS courses, to our superpowers, to what gets us going in the morning, to the challenges and opportunities we foresee in the coming few years.

It was great talking to Sam about these and many other things (outside the podcast). I hope you will enjoy listening to our conversation.

I found his characterisation that “People with disabilities is the largest minority anyone can become a part of in a heartbeat” very insightful.

After the recording, I asked Sam what his superpower is, and he said he can find anything exciting. Isn’t that fascinating!

Go to the Podcast