FORT THOMAS, Ky. — A local nonprofit and Northern Kentucky University are partnering to make learning more accessible for kids around the world.
The Clovernook Center for the Blind & Visually Impaired has been printing braille publications in the U.S. for more than 100 years, but recently, they started printing material for people across the globe.
"In the countries that we’re working in, the prevalence of blindness is much higher due to the lower standard of medical care and the amount of braille within these communities is very low to nonexistent," said Samuel Foulkes, the Director of Braille Production and Accessible Innovation for Clovernook. "We created these little kids books here that have the same system of large print and see-through braille sheets."
They partnered with NKU to bring the stories in these books to life. Students create 3D-printed models of the characters portrayed in the stories, so kids can feel the elephant or rabbit from a story rather than look at the pictures on the page.
Here's one example.
"It’s the story of an elephant and a rabbit. The rabbit is being chased by the elephant and he goes and hides in a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch," Foulkes said.
That book comes with a 3D-printed rabbit, pumpkin that the rabbit can fit in and an elephant.
Creating these figurines has been a process of trial and error for the NKU students, but it's a process they said they're excited about because they're learning and helping people at the same time.
“I’m just going to look back on it and just be like, that was really cool," Anna Dinius, an NKU student working on the project said. "I was able to help someone do something in school for my studies that actually impacted the real world."
In the last month, Foulkes said they sent 1000 books and 100 model kits to schools for the blind in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.
At Clovernook, they're working to expand the program to more countries around Africa.
"We’re trying to provide opportunities for groups local to those communities to do some of the production work themselves," Foulkes said.
Foulkes said they were able to get a 3D printer to an employee in Nairobi so he could print the 3D models for the books himself.
