The ceremony took place in Valencia and can be seen here: https://s.rnl.pt/eia_2023

The award, established by the European Patent Office, recognizes the creativity and talent of young inventors, aged 30 or under, who have developed technological solutions to address global problems and help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The Blockbased Accessible Tangible Programming Systems (BATS), the name of Filipa Rocha's invention, is the result of the work developed under the guidance of Professor Hugo Nicolau (IST) and Professor Tiago Guerreiro of the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FCUL) and consist of a block-based programming system, designed so that blind or visually impaired children can learn to command a robot. In this way, sequences of instructions are created by dragging and dropping blocks. Filipa Rocha has made these blocks tangible by decorating them with three-dimensional foam icons - which can be, for example, the direction of a movement or a speech function to command the robot's behavior - and thus allow visually impaired children to control it as if they were playing a game.

Around 90 million children and adolescents worldwide live with some form of vision loss, according to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. Teachers and parents of these children struggle to find conventional educational tools and toys that don't need to be adapted. The Portuguese researcher's invention will help democratize access to digital education.