Perspectives in Assistive Technology is a Winter Quarter Stanford course - completing its nineteenth year - that explores the design, development, and use of assistive technology that benefits people with disabilities and older adults. It consists of semi-weekly in-person discussions; lectures by notable professionals, clinicians, and assistive technology users; a tour of an accessible inclusive playground; student project presentations and demonstrations; and an Assistive Technology Faire. Students pursue team-based projects that address real challenges faced by people with disabilities and older adults living in the local community. Check out the course website.

End of the Quarter - The Winter 2025 course has come to an end. Week 10 saw the student teams' end-of-term presentations and prorject demonstrations. All end-of term reports have been read,and reviewed. Students' Individual Reflections have been accepted and the grades have been duly entered. Here are anonymous student contributions to Cardinal Course Student Survey administered by the Haas Center for Public Service. These are responses to the question: Please provide an example of a course concept that you encountered in your community engaged project. Did your exposure to the community partner help you better understand this concept? If so, how?

• “Understanding the problem.” It helped my team see first person how people manage challenges in their everyday lives with assistive technology.
• user centered design
• Yes, definitely. It helped to get insight in what he wanted and how we could help him the most we can.
• Working to understand a need by talking to.
• We visited the individual’s home and were able conduct engineering need finding in detail.
• We discussed the difficulties that disabled individuals face in doing daily tasks, and engaging with our community partner really helped me understand that on a deeper level.
• Understanding capabilities of a particular disabled person
• The project partner helped me to understand that adaptive technology needs to be made for an individual to be most effective as each disability is unique.
• The coverage of the design process in class helped.
• The course brought in several members of the community to help me understand different disabilities and how they affect the daily lives. From this, we are able to better serve these members by catering their needs in our project.
• The community member sufficiently described the scope of issues she was having.
• Test and reiterate
• One example of a course concept that I encountered is to design with the people instead of designing for them.
• My exposure to my community partner put this concept into practice.
• Lecture covered community engagement content.
• Learned how important getting a design perspective from our partner was and how that helped us develop a universal design.
• Learned about the needs of wheelchair users with regards to day to day operations.
• It definitely helped me a lot.
• Individual design. Usually we think of design in a broad and manufacturing perspective but during this class we were encouraged to empathize and understand the individual experiences of disabled people.
• I really enjoyed visiting the play ground and I appreciated all of its features
• I encountered the idea of interviewing users with disabilities.
• Human centered design - specifically understanding user needs and putting in a lot of time and effort there before actually fabricating the device. got first hand experience with this working with the community partner! Helped see the needs!
• Designing for individuals with disabilities: yes, they provided help with understanding different options and possible solutions in mind.
• Design process
• Coolness factor was a concept that I encountered in this project. Yes, my community partner helped explain why it was important to have coolness factor in accessibility design.