King's College London

Most children in England are introduced to coding during primary school through visual, block-based programming tools. While these environments are highly effective for many learners, they are often inaccessible to visually impaired children, limiting opportunities to engage with computing from an early age. Tangible programming, which uses physical objects to represent coding instructions, offers a promising alternative. However, few accessible systems are currently available, and costs can be a barrier to adoption. The project team's previous research has also highlighted that meaningful inclusion requires more than accessible technology. Inclusive approaches to programming need to be widely available and recognised as equally valid ways of learning and engaging with computing, rather than being viewed as less sophisticated alternatives (Hadwen-Bennett et al., 2026).

TIBBL (https://tibbl.er.kcl.ac.uk) was developed to address these challenges. Co-designed with visually impaired programmers, TIBBL is an accessible tangible coding system that combines physical coding tiles, a magnetic board and a web application. Using a device camera, the web app recognises the arrangement of tiles and translates them into executable programs. Learners can use TIBBL to create audio outputs, including music, providing an engaging introduction to programming and computational thinking. To support wider adoption, we have also developed a toolkit that enables educators and organisations to create their own tile sets for use with the freely available web application.

The project began in 2022/23 as an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Education, Communication & Society, King's Digital Lab and the Department of Informatics at King's College London. Bringing together expertise in computing education, UI/UX design, and inclusive HCI, the project aimed to develop a practical and scalable solution to a longstanding challenge in inclusive computing education.

Evaluation with secondary-aged visually impaired learners who had previous programming experience demonstrated strong support for the approach. Participants responded positively to both the accessibility of the system and the creative opportunities it provided. One learner reflected that they "would have really benefitted from this when in primary school", while another commented that they could see "little children being obsessed with this". These responses suggest that TIBBL has significant potential not only to improve access to coding but also to increase engagement and enjoyment.

Feedback from educators has also been highly encouraging. Teachers highlighted the system's ease of use, rapid setup and practical classroom application. TIBBL was viewed as a straightforward, "plug-and-play" solution that could be integrated quickly into teaching. The browser-based web application is particularly important because it avoids the need to install software on school devices, making the system compatible with the restricted IT environments commonly found in schools.

A key insight from the project is that accessibility alone is insufficient to achieve meaningful inclusion. Educational technologies must also be affordable, scalable and widely available. Visually impaired learners consistently emphasised that they did not want to use different tools from their peers, highlighting the importance of approaches that support whole-class participation. These findings strengthen the case for moving beyond specialist, small-scale provision and towards solutions that can be adopted more widely across mainstream educational settings.

To support this next stage of development, the project has recently secured funding through the King's SPARK Innovation Scheme. This funding will enable the team to explore cost-effective manufacturing methods for producing TIBBL sets at scale while undertaking further user testing to refine the system and support wider implementation.

Funders

This project has been generously supported by:

• King’s College London, ECS Departmental Seedcorn Funding (2022/23)
• King’s Digital Futures Institute Fellowship (2025/26)
• King’s SPARK Innovation Fund (2026/27)

People

Principle Investigator: Alex Hadwen-Bennett

Co-Investigator: Timothy Neate

Project Team: Alexandre Nevsky, Xinyun He, Samantha Callaghan, Elliot Hall, Zihao Lu and Tiffany Ong