Student elves adapt toys for the disabled
Teenagers from Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit 21 tinker to make the items more accessible.
“Working on the fart gun,” Matthew Peters muttered, hunched over a table where the innards of toys were spread haphazardly before him and his high school comrades like the aftermath of a North Pole misadventure.
Soldering guns. Magnifying glasses. Switches. Wires. Battery cases.
What in the name of Hermey the Elf was going on?
Something good, we are relieved to report. Peters and a couple of dozen other students from high schools in Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit 21 had gathered Thursday at the unit’s North Whitehall Township headquarters for a Christmas task: making common toys accessible to children with disabilities.
Yipping puppies, a roaring Tyrannosaurus rex, a tornado lamp containing a vortex of colorchanging water, a mechanized bubble-maker and, yes, the aforementioned fart gun — these and other toys underwent an assembly line reconstruction as students opened them, rewired the insides, attached big, colorful switches and sewed them shut.
With the toys reconfigured, children with limited mobility or poor fine motor skills can operate them without having to fumble with small on-off switches or hard-to-push sensors.
Peters, for example, a Northern Lehigh High School junior, fixed the gun — a movie tie-in toy called the “Despicable Me Fart Blaster” — so the button acted as the trigger. It made the same unfortunate noises, however.
“They can press the button with their hand, elbow, foot — wherever they have mobility,” said Danielle Argot of the intermediate unit’s assistive technology services department, which is dedicated to helping young people with disabilities acquire and use technology that helps them function.
Argot attended a conference in Florida early this year where she learned about toy adaptation and when she returned, she applied for and obtained a $1,500 grant to start a program.
Toy adaptation itself, also called toy hacking, is a popular activity in the science, technology, engineering and math curriculum, commonly called STEM.
Mostly it’s an exercise in pulling mechanical things apart, seeing what makes them work and modifying them to do other things — in essence, simple robotics. Using the practice to brighten the holidays for children with disabilities is a happy new wrinkle.
Thursday’s volunteers were drafted from vocation classes at various high schools in the unit. They brought the plastic switches — all of them made in 3D printers at the schools — and set to rewiring enough toys for 65 students with disabilities across the unit.
“Some of these students may have never received a toy they can use independently,” Argot said.
It wasn’t easy work and there were surprises along the way. Dillan Crisp, for instance, a junior from Parkland High School, discovered that the weight and length of the new switch cord on the Tyrannosaurus rex threw the toy off-balance, so he had to trim the cord to the right length.
Responding to those hiccups was a key part of the exercise for the toy hackers, said Susan Gill of the Pennsylvania Training and Technology Assistance Network.
“The holiday thing is really great, but the hidden value of this is that it’s a way for them to connect STEM to people in their community,” she said. “So it’s bigger than Christmas.”
Mostly it’s an exercise in pulling mechanical things apart, seeing what makes them work and modifying them to do other things.