Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Lego Braille Bricks Put the Alphabet at Blind Children's' Fingertips

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the ⠁⠃⠉ dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

Lego fans have always known the colorful plastic bricks are more than just toys. They're worlds waiting to be created. Lego is now expanding its universe even more with a new project, Lego Braille Bricks.

The customized bricks are molded with studs that correspond to letters and numbers in Braille, but are also fully compatible with regular Lego pieces. Lego hopes to encourage blind and visually impaired kids to learn the reading system through interactive games and play.

The Braille Bricks kits contain around 250 pieces covering the full alphabet, plus numbers and math symbols. "To ensure the tool is inclusive allowing sighted teachers, students and family members to interact on equal terms, each brick will also feature a printed letter or character," Lego said in an announcement on Wednesday.

We're super excited to introduce LEGO Braille Bricks – a new product from @TheLegoFoundation that will help blind and visually impaired children learn Braille in a playful and inclusive way! pic.twitter.com/48cqYEZ54t
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) April 24, 2019

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/lego-braille-bricks-put-the-alphabet-at-blind-kids-fingertips/

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Lego Braille Bricks Put the Alphabet at Blind Children's' Fingertips | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 5 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:23AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:23AM (#837627) Journal

    Now some sleazy capitalists want to monetize this by requiring blind kids to buy plastic "teaching kits".

    While I sortof see your "making profit exploiting disability" point, I really doubt that "buying Lego is made compulsory" suggestion you make with "by requiring".

    And the most tragic part is that the blind kids are far more likely to choke to death on Lego bricks than on Helen's textbook.

    This does not mean Lego bricks for blind are useless [popsci.com], it just means they need to be used with care. You know? "Parenting" and "supervision" and "development age" aren't outdated concepts to be relegated to long gone history.

    The linked - from June 2016 - (short enough to be pasted entirely):

    When he was little, Matthew Shifrin loved building with Legos, but his blindness prevented him from constructing sets from instructions.

    "I drooled over large Lego sets on the internet, never thinking I'd be able to build them myself," Shifrin writes in an article in the latest issue of Future Reflections, a magazine for parents and teachers of blind children.

    That changed on his thirteenth birthday when Shifrin's friend, Lilya Finkel, gave him the gift of Lego access. She brought him a Lego set (Battle of Almut, 841 pieces) with the instructions written in a special notation that she'd invented, carefully describing each piece, its orientation, and its target location. Using a screen reader, Shifrin was able to follow the instructions and build a Lego set on his own for the first time. In the years since, Shifrin and Finkel have perfected the notation system, creating blind-accessible instructions for over twenty Lego sets including Hogwarts Castle, Volkswagen T1 Camper Van, and Luke's Landspeeder.

    "Lego is an excellent brain strain," Shifrin writes. "It's a great way to improve spatial awareness and spatial reasoning--areas where blind people sometimes have trouble."

    Blind children would benefit from more opportunities to build with Legos, writes Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, in the same issue of Future Reflections. It can help them learn to build mental maps, he writes, a crucial skill for navigating independently. He calls for a "Lego revolution for the blind" centered around the creation of a library of text-based Lego instructions written in a common language. Shifrin and Finkel's work appears to be a big step towards that goal.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4