Blind or visually impaired toddlers risk tripping over objects they can’t see and as a result tend to be overly cautious walkers. To help them learn to walk safely and more quickly, researchers at the City University of New York have invented a “toddler cane.”

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Filed under: Special Features | Comments Off on Baby Gait

Tags: assistive technology, blind, CCNY, Engineering Design, Safe Toddles, toddler cane, visually impaired

It began with a conundrum: How to accommodate a blind mechanical engineering major who needed to take a required engineering graphics course but couldn’t access its computer-assisted design system. Steven Zemke, a professor of engineering and physics at Whitworth University, figured out a way to teach fundamental visualization and drawing skills using assistive technologies such as braille pads – and small, 3-D-printed plastic parts that could felt and then sketched on special “swell paper” to show the raised lines like the example pictured here.

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Tags: American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, assistive technologies, Blind mechanical engineering student, computer-assisted design, Engineering Design, engineering graphics, Research on Learning, spatial visualization, STEM education, Steven Zemke, Whitworth University