PROGETTO: “Students ambassadors of accessible Mathematics”

The project is a path for soft skills and orientation (art. 1, comma 785, legge 30 dicembre 2018, n.145) of the duration of 30 hours (for students).Since 2022 edition has been a success with the participation of 50 high school students, and in order to satisfy the demand, a second edition is going to take place in 2023.
The intervention originates from the necessity to expand the diffusion of the culture of accessibility, in line with the recent documents of MI about the soft skills development and the education for active citizenship.
The objectives of this intervention are:
1. To train high school students in basic LaTeX knowledge
2. To train high school students in trascription of texts containing formulas
3. To illustrate the main issues and prospectives of accessibility to mathematics to the
students, and consequently to their teachers
4. To spread the culture of accessibility in schools
5. To begin a virtuous path of training for young “ambassadors of accessibility”
6. To orientate the students towards a scientific university career.

PROJECT PHASES

  1. In the first phase, students are received in the Department of Mathematics “G. Peano”. They get to visit the laboratory “S. Polin”, discover the activities of the and most of all they discover LaTeX language – markup language used to produce pdf texts – applied to the production of pdf files with mathematical formulae. (Encounters: 13th and 16th of June 2022)
  2. In the second phase, students are asked to use LaTeX language with Axessibility package for the transcription of a secondary school textbook. Moreover, they work on the testing part, to make sure that the automatic reading can perform well i.e. the transcription in pdf file is accessible to screen readers.
    In this second part they work in a remote way, under supervision of the Laboratory
  3. Final party (25 July, 11-14) to share knowledge and materials that have been produced

Total amount of time: 30 hours for each student

Participants: 54 students, coming from 8 different high school of Piedmont Region