Students with visual impairments can have difficulty with visual and spatial relationships. 3D printers can print almost everything, and with a lot of CAD work, this project in the Hackaday Prize provides these students with physical objects to learn any subject.
[Joan] and [Whosawhatsis] have already written the book on 3D printed science projects and have produced a 3D printed Braille map of a campus, but for this project, they’re making things a little bit simpler. Visually impaired students are tactile learners and the simplest of their 3D printable objects are fixed volume objects. This collection of 3D printable cylinders, cones, prisms, and pyramids give a physical representation of geometric solids. These objects also have another trick up their sleeve: they all contain the same volume. Fill the cylinder up with water, pour that water into a cone, and the student will discover that they all contain the same volume. That’s useful for the visually impaired, but would also put these printable shapes at home in any elementary or middle school math class.
This project already has a rather large following, with teachers of the visually impaired contributing on a Google Group, and a ton of people downloading the models. [Joan] and [Whosawhatsis] are getting a lot of great feedback and growing the range of contributors, making this the start of an awesome community and a great Hackaday Prize entry.
Heard this on the radio in the car the other day about 3d printed astronomical objects. Worth a listen…
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/thiswayup/audio/201819097/touching-the-universe-astronomy-for-the-blind
Thanks for the tip! We are trying to gather as many examples as we can.
Hey wouldn’t it be cool if they printed that in 8×4 sheets you could roof your shed with!!!1111….
http://howtobuildahouseblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/PVC_corrugated_roofing_sheet.jpg
With the cost of filament, buying the pre-made sheets is probably a lot cheaper! :-)
Yeah I was cocking a snook at the usual bad example of “objects we can only have through the miracle of 3d printing”
You cant make peoples hearts bleed and their eyes water with roofing material for the blind. Cmon man.
Yeah, the single wave shown is pretty close to the shape of some things that you can buy. When you add a second wave that interferes with the first, it becomes a pretty hard-to-find shape.