The Wasatch Center for Advanced Professional Studies is a Wasatch County School District program. It connects local businesses and industry mentors with students to help them develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills through real-world projects.
As part of the CAPS engineering and industrial design department, junior Emmet Stirling and seniors Finnian Schaffer and John McGinn are designing toys for children with visual impairments.
Some of the toys are designed for kids who are blind, while others are designed for children with cortical or cerebral visual impairments, also called CVI. The Perkins School for the Blind estimates there are over 180,000 kids with CVI in the U.S., most undiagnosed.
Stirling said CVI is a condition affecting the brain, but it can impact vision.
“One of the challenging things is that it changes day to day,” he said. “It's different for the person, and it's different day to day, which causes some learning challenges, especially with experiencing and understanding what's going on in the world around you.”
The toys are meant to be fun and educational, teaching basic concepts like colors and numbers. Toys for blind students also teach braille, while McGinn said the toys for kids with CVI aim to simplify what they’re seeing.
“We're using easy-to-distinguish colors and easy-to-distinguish shapes that aren't very, like, cluttered,” he said. “We're trying to help them understand what's around them better.”
Right now, the trio is working on prototypes using a 3D printer. They learned how to design 3D models in other classes and are now applying the knowledge for real world projects.
Schaffer said eventually, kids will test the toys. He worked on a similar project in the fall designing preschool toys, and said having the kids play with the toys helped with the process. That’s because they quickly find faults with the toys.
For example, one toy kids played with was meant to teach numbers. Kids had to match various spiral pieces with numbers on the toy and once they did, they slid together.
“The very first thing they did is they just matched number five with number one,” Schaffer said. “Obviously, we're not trying to teach them that five corresponds to number one. So meeting with the kids really helps us actually find errors in the toys that we're making that normally we wouldn't really think about.”
Stirling said they’re now working on repurposing the designs, which is common in the engineering world. They’re aiming to design as many toys as possible for kids with CVI, as there aren’t many available.
“It's a relatively new front for special education and learning,” he said. “How it was described to us by one of our clients, where autism was a decade ago, this is where CVI is, where it didn't have enough work being put into it.”
The group said they are excited to be participating in the CAPS program because it feels like their work is making a positive impact on real people.
