Modular 3-D-Printed Education Tool for Blind and Visually Impaired Students Oriented to Net Structures

Abstract

Contribution: This article presents the design, 1 creation, testing, and results after the use of a 3-D-printed edu-2 cational tool that helped a blind student learning electric circuits 3 theory in higher education. 4 Background: Educational tools oriented to visually impaired 5 and blind students in higher education are limited or even nonex-6 istent in the STEM area. Previous developments on the field 7 present in the literature, including other 3-D printing solutions, 8 have been revised and compared to the proposed educational 9 tool. 10 Intended Outcomes: The tool was tested by a blind student 11 in order to test the potential of the design to achieve a bet-12 ter understanding of the topology and performance of electric 13 circuits. The main purpose of the tool described in this work is 14 helping to increase the resources available in the field of teaching 15 students with visual impairments. 16 Application Design: 3-D technology has the potential to be 17 used to create accessibility tools for visually impaired and blind 18 individuals. Modular systems can be used to create complex 19 structures using simple elements. A modular 3-D-printed tool 20 was fabricated to help blind and visually impaired students to 21 learn net structures. 22 Findings: The 3-D tool has allowed the blind student to work 23 autonomously in the study of simple electric circuits and supplies 24 the teacher with a resource to communicate with the student in 25 an easy and fast way. Updated design can be used to describe 26 more complex net structures that can be applied to most electric 27 circuits despite their complexity. The use of the modular system 28 provided the blind student with a direct representation of the 29 whole subject, even when it involved a great amount of graphical 30 information and manipulation. 31 Index Terms-3-D printing, blindness, computer engineering, 32 design, higher education, prototyping, rapid prototyping (RP), 33 students with disabilities.