Hi Michael,

Thanks for helping to facilitate discussion about our project. We are just getting started with the project and yes, some of this work is focused on learning more about what is possible, both in terms of what we can accomplish in informal community Makerspaces as well as how we can effectively engage in the project youth with visual impairments. We have collaborated with a preschool for children who are visually impaired and with the Colorado Center for the Blind (CCB) to gather input about the design of tactile materials and to inform the project about the accessibility of different tools and technologies. One of our team members (Ann Cunningham) is a tactile artist who teaches art at CCB and her expertise has been invaluable to the project. This summer, we will be running a week-long workshop for youth who are blind, in collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind, and we hope that experience, as well as a series of fall workshops at CCB, will help us shape the program in a way that effectively involves students who are visually impaired as co-designers in the project.

Selecting appropriate tools for the project has been a challenge. On the one hand, we want to use tools that are readily available to students and teachers and that can be accessible to all students, including those with visual impairments. However, we are also looking to create designs that can be easily replicated, so that teachers and parents can easily access, download and print products for their children. Our participants begin this exercise by building prototypes out of craft materials, but then shift to creating digital designs that can be stored, shared and re-mixed.

Although they are certainly not ubiquitous, 3D printers have become more common at schools, libraries and community Makerspaces. In fact, when we began developing this project, we heard from many teachers and librarians who had 3D printers available but wanted more authentic design challenges for their students. This project addresses that issue, but it is also accompanied by some challenges of working with 3D printers: they do require some expertise and troubleshooting, and it can take a long time to print one page. We are currently exploring some different tools to address some of those issues in order to make the project more feasible in a wider variety of spaces.

HI, I'm part of the TPBP team working with Stacey and others at CU Boulder. . An exciting aspect of our formative research design is the documenting and study of the design variations that occur across settings and workshop topics.  As the project has unfolded, we've iteratively designed specific workshops as we try them out in new contexts. Our more in-depth analysis this summer will inform what we hope will be a robust instructional model for this type of maker-space and project-based learning.

Thanks, Janet! We are only just getting started... but so far we are extremely excited about this project's potential to involve teens in making while at the same time, address a very real need. Thanks for checking out our video!

Hi Betsy,
Thanks for your interest in our project. This is a relatively new project but you can view additional photos from our spring workshops on our Google Communities page. This spring, most of our workshops were run as 2-hour after-school or weekend workshops, so many students worked on short projects that could be completed within that window of time. Some members of our team have also been working with a high school class over the past month, and that has enabled students to tackle more in-depth projects (e.g., working in teams to produce a complete book, with multiple tactile/audio-enhanced pages). We are also looking forward to running more extended sessions this summer, to enable participants to work on their projects over a longer period of time, using a combination of different tools.

This is very helpful info!  Although our projects were teacher ones, they varied like this and also some set up on Google early on.  We were lucky to have our evaluation team point to the philosophy of Developmental Evaluation to address the situation of short, long and varied projects that needed to have a united system. It would seem to me that many STEM projects would face this same problem, especially heading into ESSA.  How are you managing evaluation?

Hi Betsy,

Thanks for sharing your experience with evaluation in these creative, fast-moving maker-space projects!  We are working with a program evaluator who is drawing on a range of data sources, including surveys and observations.  As a development team, we are also collecting rich qualitative information from the workshop participants, librarians, etc. that we are using to inform development for next years' enactments.  We hope to interweave analysis and findings so that we have a more robust understanding of the design and outcomes.  The work is very contextualized and situated, but we are seeing some themes emerging across contexts.  We will see if they are borne out by our more detailed analysis this summer! 

Dear Vivian,

Our TPBP team has discussed the possibility of connecting with a publisher about featuring some 3D versions of books. We think we will have some excellent models at the end of the summer, given the opportunity to have more extended time in some of our maker camps.  We're just wrapping up working with a 9th grade English Language Arts teacher and her students on a project to design 3D versions of some well-known children's books, such as Eric Carle's 1,2,3 to the Zoo.  The students selected pages to represent the story, designed in TinkerCad, added braille text using Tom Yeh's app, and then layered in sound with Scratch and Makey-Makey.  They are in the process of being printed now -- the students know that the books will be delivered to families with children with visual impairments and have expressed appreciation for this opportunity to make something that is useful to others, while  learning some skills. 

Great question, Kathy. This project builds on the work of the Tactile Picture Books Project (based in our PI Tom Yeh's lab at CU Boulder) and since its inception, the lab has worked with teachers of the visually impaired to gather feedback on its 3D-printed products. We have heard, for example, that 3D printed braille can be rough and unpleasant to read, and so we have been testing different approaches to address that issue. This spring, a partner high school class has been working to create tactile and audio-enhanced stories; once complete (very soon!), those will be sent to several families with children who are blind or visually impaired. We look forward to hearing their feedback and sharing that with other young designers on the project, in order to improve the quality of these books.

We haven't worked with Bookshare yet but we have been in contact with Benetech, the organization behind Bookshare. Benetech has been following our work closely. It would be great to explore the possibility whether the books produced by our students can be distributed through Bookshare's various channels.

We included collaboration with students who are visually impaired in our proposal -- we agree that this is so important to the success of the project.  This spring, Ann Cunningham and Abby Stangle, members of our team, have been working with adults and adolescents on tactile art, and have also been able to videotape a teen who is visualy impaired interacting with some 3D printed books to gain her perspective on how it is to process this kind of input (graphics and braille). We are hoping to build this aspect of collaboration for next year. 

Hi Laura,

Yes - this is one of the key things that excites us most about this project! In some of our early outreach collaborations with the Tactile Picture Books Project, we were encouraged by the degree to which the overall goal of the project inspired youth, particularly girls, to get involved. For example, several of the library Makerspaces we work with are accustomed to seeing majorities of boys in their 3D printing and technology workshops, and in our first set of pilot workshops we consistently had higher numbers of girls. We are now examining students' motivations for participating in the project as well as how the project's overall purpose influences their persistence over the long term.

One thing we are planning to modify this summer and in the coming year is to strengthen the connection between the youth design teams and particular clients. For example, instead of designing for the project in general, teams will be designing for a particular child so that they can customize their design based on their client's interests. We're curious how this may affect the teens' interest and persistence in the project as well.

Hi Sarah,

Yes, we do several introductory exercises to help our designers think more about the needs of their end user. Designing a tactile image that can be readily interpreted by someone who is blind or visually impaired is a very challenging design task! Before they start, we also share with them some guidelines and considerations. For example, a clear outline is very important, as is a way to orient oneself on the page; complicated images (for example, that involve multiple items grouped together) can be very challenging to interpret by touch.

In the coming year, we’re hoping to connect our designers with specific ‘clients,’ so that they can learn more about their actual end user and ideally, hear feedback about their product from someone who is using it.

Our 9th grade students highlighted the importance of some of our introductory sensory experiences (drawing with a sensation board with a mask on, while  listening to a story being read aloud; modeling with clay to tune in the shape, texture and size aspects of their animal, etc.).  We also shared a brief video of a young student reading one page with a crafted tactile illustration and braille text.  This had a big impact on students' understanding, as they keyed into the way that the child relied on the outline and salient features of the mouse to make sense of it. Just as important was to see how quickly the child's fingers scanned the braille as he read aloud.  It was important for these adolescents to understand that children can read braille with great fluency.  This motivated them to add braille to their picture book pages.

Thanks, Anna! I haven't connected with the DO-IT Center but I will certainly ask others on my team if they have - it looks like an impressive program with some really great resources. Thanks so much for that suggestion!

Hi,  Bridget, 

 Although we had 3D printers in the last month of the project, the most important for one district were the video cams from ICreate with stencils and cameras.  Just thinking of classic picturebooks, the kids building their visuals like that there are "picturebook codes" ...as described by William Moebius," Introduction to Picturebook Codes".  Some are very physical (screens, stairs)  and others refer to page positioning.  Either  would be interesting to introduce to your artists.

Thanks for your interest in our project, Kathy! We look forward to sharing more as it progresses. 

Thanks, Deborah, for watching our video! And yes- we're excited to see such strong interest in the project among girls. We're hoping to offer more opportunities for teens to engage with the project over a longer time, so that they can contribute to and complete different book projects. We are tracking their participation in project activities at the different library sites, and plan to stay in touch with participants so that we can hopefully gather information about their education plans and career aspirations. 

Thanks, Anna! We will reach out to them soon to learn more!

Thanks for watching our video, Christopher, and for your interest in the project. We look forward to sharing more as we get further along with the project. 

Hello Teagan- Thanks for your comment and interest in our project. And, yes, we usually have the 3D pens out when we are doing our 3D printing workshop. It gives the students a more tangible and immediate feedback on how 3D printing works and allows them to create something right away. They are also nice because some students are more drawn to working on the computer and some are more drawn to working with their hands.