The Assistive Technology Challenge (ATC) is a hands-on, project-based course introducing students to assistive technologies, user-centered (co-)design, project management, basic engineering tools, as well as method-specific, social, and personal competences. In interdisciplinary groups of four, students work together with a person with a physical disability (challenger). In those teams, technical solutions for real-world, individual everyday challenges of the challengers are developed and evaluated collaboratively. The goal at the end of the course is that the challengers can keep and use the solutions in their daily life. This course, therefore, offers the students the opportunity to work on a project with an immediate practical benefit and a real impact on society.
Implementation of the Course
During the course, the students are guided through (at least) two iterations of a user-centered design process. Each full iteration consists of five distinct phases: “empathizing”, “defining”, “ideating”, “prototyping”, and “evaluating”. The first half of the semester consists mainly of applied lectures and hands-on workshops to provide students with the practical tools and skills required for their project. Students are asked to attend the workshops they deemed most relevant for their specific task in the project and where they have no previous knowledge, whereas the lectures are targeted at all students. The second half of the semester is dedicated entirely to independently working on their project. During the regular lecture and exercise slots, on-site support from the supervisors is provided, including scheduled progress meetings every two weeks. Additional support outside those slots is offered upon request, either via email or scheduled extra meetings. In the last week of the semester, a closing event takes place, where the project outcomes are showcased to challengers, other students, external guests, and the teaching staff.
The course includes multiple graded performance assessments during the semester (“deliverables”), each with an (individually weighted) contribution to the final grade, and continuous oral and written feedback provided to the students throughout the semester, as well as student-to-student feedback during intermediate presentations.
As final deliverable, the students create a video showcasing their individual challenge, working progress, and final prototypes. Firstly, these videos allow students to revisit and document their working process during the semester in an easily accessible manner. Secondly, they should train students in efficient communication through media and effective dissemination for a lay audience.
As the course aims to teach and train skills in a real-world context, the use of AI (or any other available resources) to develop the prototypes is not only allowed but even encouraged. However, due to the strongly unique and highly individualized nature of the challenges, it is not expected that AI can fully solve the task and an exceptionally high level of creativity and problem-solving skills is still required from the students themselves.
Motivation, Project Mission, Vision Statement
The course exposes students to real-world assistive technology design through a challenge-based learning format. It addresses societal and individual needs by placing students in close collaboration with people with physical disabilities (called “challengers”), helping them tackle a real daily-life barrier. The format is inspired by the annual HackaHealth hackathon, translating its collaborative and impact-driven spirit and fast pace into a structured, semester-long educational setting.
The mission of the course is to teach students (and, hence, potential future engineers) how to develop, prototype, and evaluate assistive technologies in a user-centered design process, emphasizing direct engagement with end users to ensure the solutions are not only functional, but meaningful. With this, students gain firsthand experience of how engineering can support societal needs, promote inclusion, and improve quality of life for individuals with disabilities.
Innovative Elements
The hands-on, project-based approach of this course combines relevant subject-specific competences such as engineering, user-centered design, accessibility, and project management, with social and personal competencies. Uniquely, this course further fosters the direct interaction with actual end users of the technologies (i.e., people with disabilities) and aims for practical outcomes which can and will directly be used in the real world after completion of the project. This prospect of working on a real problem and the outcome having a real impact is expected to have a considerable positive effect on students’ motivation. Further, this format prepares them well for later projects in their career where they will also not be able to fall back on an off-the-shelf solution.
Conventionally, during group projects in their studies, students mostly work together with other students from their own or very closely related fields. However, after graduating and when working in industry, they will likely often work together with colleagues from different backgrounds. Therefore, the interdisciplinary collaboration between students coming from various departments is intended to equip the students with important personal and social competencies for their future careers.
Effects on Student Learning
In a feedback survey after completion of the course, students indicated that they had developed competencies across all areas of the ETH competency framework, with particularly strong gains in social (e.g., communication, cooperation, and teamwork) and personal (e.g., adaptability, creative and critical thinking) skills compared to subject-specific (e.g., prototyping and risk management) or methodological competencies (e.g., project management and problem-solving). This contrasts with many traditional ETH courses focusing primarily on subject-specific skills and was perceived by students as highly relevant for their future careers.
Which Elements of Your Project Would You Recommend to Others?
Framing a course project around a real-world challenge, which includes the building of a personal connection between the students and the intended recipient of the project outcome, highly promotes students‘ engagement and motivation. However, it needs to be considered that the scaling of such a course format is difficult: if a similar course should accommodate a notably larger number of students, the offered projects would need to pursue a common challenge, and significantly more resources (e.g., workshop access, supervisors, hardware budget) would need to be provided.
