Close your eyes. Now have someone describe a map to you. How about a graph or a piece of art? How about an animal you have never heard of? Did your imagination match the picture? You can open your eyes and make corrections to your misconceptions, my students do not have that luxury.
I am the librarian at a school that serves students who are blind or have low vision.
We serve kids from the age of three all the way up to twenty-one. As the Internet and "visual literacy" become more important, having the latest technology to help our students have the same access to information becomes critical. I see great potential in 3-D printing allowing us to create items and representations of things like maps and even mathematical concepts so our students can experience them actually instead of only relying on a sighted person's description.
My Project
I see 3-D printers as a way to quickly create tactile representations of items that our students can feel to help them understand what we are discussing. As 3-D printers have come on the market for private use, we are already seeing professionals serving the blind/low vision community start to create files for 3-D printers to help everyone from a preschooler learning to read braille to a high school student learning trigonometry. A 3-D printer will allow us to create items for our students to feel when they need it, instead of trying to describe it or wait for a model to arrive. This will be a great way to help our students catch up with their sighted peers quicker as they work to build their background knowledge in all the things most of us can just see a picture of and understand. I also see the use of the 3-D printer expanding our students' opportunities in the STEM curriculum, so they can start creating their own 3-D projects.
This project will give us access to the 3-D files being created for use by blind/low vision children along with the ability to create our own.
As humans, we get about 75-90% of what we learn through our sense of vision. Having the ability to create a tactile representation of very vision-oriented concepts will help our students to keep up with their sighted-peers. I also see this as being part of a Maker Lab for our older students who are interested in STEM careers.
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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