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The interactive braille tutor device by Ideas Unlimited comprises a tutor unit and a remote unit. the tutor unit speaks out alphabets before arranging the dots when the user presses buttons on the remote unit. the quiz mode allows the students to test the
Whenever science and humanity come together, the world rejoices. This time it’s a device developed by Nagendra Setty, CEO of Ideas Unlimited. Setty, with his team, has developed a device which assists the visually challenged in learning the Braille system of reading DnG wUiWing. TKe SURGuFW, RIfiFiDOOy called the interactive braille tutor with speech assist capability, eliminates the need for a teacher to be with the students at all times.
TKe fiUVW TueVWiRn WKDW FRPeV WR our mind is “What made them think of developing such a device? Are the teachers not doing a good enough job or is it more of a ratio problem?”
SeWWy FODUifieV, “,W’V PRUe RI WKe latter. In India, the number of Braille teachers attending to individual students is quite bad. We can’t expect them to be able to attend to all of them but there was one school that I visited where 5M students were being attended to by a single teacher. That’s not helping anyone in any way. On the contrary, it’s actually quite detrimental to the teaching process. It was only a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ such a device would be designed and I’m just thankful we could do it.”
The coventional system
Conventional braille teaching in India still relies on the use of a wooden plate that has six dips representing a Braille cell and a glass marble that has to be placed inside the dips to form a Braille character. Usually, the children drop WKe PDUEOeV Rn WKe flRRU DnG WKeUeIRUe a lot of time is spent in recovering the marbles in the classroom.
Unlike conventional classroom teaching where one teacher can teach many students, Braille teaching is a NWN system as the children are blind and have to tune to the sense of touch to learn Braille. auring the initial stages of learning, the teacher has to arrange dots for each child in the class, then take it to each child and verbally speak out what the arrangment means. This has to be repeated every day until the children become skilled in the script. At the end of the day, the teachers, most of whom are blind themselves, are exhausted due to both verbal and activity overload.
The interactive tutor
The interactive braille tutor device comprises a braille tutor unit and a remote unit. The braille tutor unit has six slots, each of which houses a wooden bead. The beads come out in various combinations to represent a particular letter of the English alphabet in Braille. There are a couple of features that make learning fun. The device interacts by way of speech, which reduces the monotony of not having a human teacher. The quiz mode allows the students to test their learning.
The product demonstrated by the team teaches Kannada and English along with numbers and symbols, using Kannada as the medium of instruction. It has been designed such that the Braille character data as well as the digitised speech data is stored on an Sa memory card inside the unit. By changing the content of the Sa memory card, one can easily customise the product to provide training in different media of instructions and teach different (even foreign) languages.