Last week, Danielle Ulacco and I attended an extraordinary workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder in which we received official training on their “Build a Better Book” Program. During this incredibly eye-opening experience, we were trained on the various ways to engage youth in the design and fabrication of inclusive media, including picture books, games, and tactile graphics. We used both low and high tech tools and materials to explore ways of designing, fabricating, testing and refining multi-modal books, games and graphics that incorporate tactile and audio features. The overall goal of this workshop was to share what we learned with our students so they can begin to design for learners with visual impairments as well as other physical and learning disabilities.
As soon as we returned to school on Monday, we dove right into these concepts and shared what we learned from this workshop with our middle school STEAM students. We began with an activity called Tactile Pictionary. As stated on the Build a Better Book program’s website, “This activity is an engaging way to introduce the Build a Better Book project. By playing a tactile version of the game Pictionary while blindfolded, students experience what it would be like to interpret a drawing in a different way, using their sense of touch instead of sight. Using their experience with the activity, participants generate a list of key features of effective tactile diagrams that they will then be able to use later in the project.”
To begin the game, we arranged the students in groups of two or three. One or two people in each group were the artist(s) and the other was blindfolded and tasked with guessing what the object was. The artist(s) received the name of an object to depict in a tactile picture, using Wikki Sticks on the board. Once the tactile picture was completed, the blindfolded student tried to guess what the object was, using only their sense of touch. After completing a few rounds of this game, students came to many realizations about what it means to design for and communicate information tactically for someone with a visual impairment. We heard comments like, “we need to emphasize the important parts only,” and “it doesn’t have to look like the object, it should feel like it.”
Overall, we were blown away by the level of compassion and interest our students expressed for this initiative in just one class period, and we were humbled to see our students becoming makers who design for equity through this simple activity. We are so excited to see how the Build a Better Book project unfolds in our classroom and beyond!
