Open Montessori

Product Design / Fabrication

About

Collected here is a series of photographs of designed and fabricated toys and crayons for visually impaired students. This was a project I worked on while working at Colab XYZ. Funded by the non-profit Open Montessori in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the toys are meant to apply texture to color through sense of touch and pattern recognition.

Problem Statement

Open Montesorri wanted to create a new way for visually impaired students to learn about colors in a more hands on approach. Deeping their understanding of colors with physical objects. They reached out to Colab XYZ to develop and produce textured toys and crayons for use in teaching.

Solution

At Colab XYZ the team and I designed and produced a set of 3D printed colored blocks that each have a textured pattern associated with the color. The goal of the blocks were for students to be able to use their sense of touch and pattern recognition to learn colors by association to the pattern. A wooden tray was created to hold the blocks with each section having one of the textured patterns laser cut into the wood so students would be able to know where each block went and continue to develop the correlation between the colors and the patterns.

The next step of the project was applying the patterns to crayons. We made 3D printed models of the triangular crayons each with one of the patterns on the sides, and using a vacuum former we created plastic molds for each crayon. Students would be able to pick up a crayon and feel the pattern on the sides to know what color they were using.