WILLIAM LI: My name is William Li.
I'm a Ph.D. Student in computer science at MIT.
And for this course, I was a graduate instructor
for 6.811, principles and practice
of assistive technology.
And that meant I was one of the c-instructors of the class.
GRACE TEO: Cool.
And my name is Grace Teo.
I am a lecturer for 6.811.
And basically our class is about pairing students up
with clients with disabilities to create a customized piece
of assistive technology for them over the course
of the semester.
So the reason why I got into teaching this course
is partly because of William, because William invited me.
But also the background to that was
that over the summer at MIT, I had founded
a very similar class called Open Style Lab,
where we teamed up students with clients
with disabilities as well.
Except that in that case, we were asking the students
to create clothing for them.
So this entire area of designing around
a constraints of disability is very interesting to me
because, first of all, there's very immediate community
impact.
I think because of that too, then
the students have a lot of motivation
to try their best to learn because they see that they're
really impacting a real person and helping
to solve a real problem instead of just doing problem sets
or solving kind of abstract challenges.
And I think, to be honest, one of the things I love
is seeing the students get comfortable talking
to and talking about people with disabilities over time as well.
Because I think very often in society
there's a huge amount of discomfort surrounding
disability.
And it's not that people don't care
it's just that they don't want to say the wrong things,
you don't want to be offensive, and so
equipping our students with the skills
to be able to engage with the community is really important.
WILLIAM LI: So I was fortunate as an undergrad
to work at a children's rehabilitation hospital
one summer and learn about the space of assistive technology.
And I ended up doing that in my undergraduate thesis.
And so when I went to grad school,
I wanted to continue working in assistive technology.
And I was fortunate to be able to do that here at MIT.
So my master's thesis was working
a lot in speech recognition for people with different speech
challenges with multiple sclerosis that
maybe affects their speech.
So I think it's a really-- similar to Grace,
I think it's a really fascinating area to work in,
very personally meaningful, but also very interesting
design constraints and challenges
in working in this space.
And so with respect to the class, my master's thesis
adviser Seth Teller started this class back in 2011.
I was fortunate to be the first teaching
assistant in the class.
And then to get involved in it with a big team,
including Grace for sure, over the past semester.