The tactile diagram scanner, a School of Engineering Design Clinic project that recently was donated to the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, is a case study in the importance of communication.
Completion of the tactile diagram scanner took three years, three teams and 13 students, with each team working on a portion of the project and handing it off to the next one.
The project started in fall 2017 as an idea from Dennis Siemer, an Engineering Design Clinic sponsor who volunteers with Minnesota State Services for the Blind. His foundation, the Dennis K. and Vivian D. Siemer Foundation, sponsored development of the tactile diagram scanner.
“When we do these multiphase projects where different teams take it and they’re done and another team has to take it from there, it really illustrates to the students how important the communication piece is, because they’re not going to be around for the next stage,” Design Clinic Lead Dr. Tiffany Ling said.
In the booklet accompanying the School of Engineering Senior Design Show, students described the tactile diagram scanner’s purpose as “digitally preserving original tactile diagrams – tactile representations of visual learning components in textbooks such as graphs, pictures and maps. By saving digital versions of the original physical diagrams, they are protected from damage and are more easily shared with teachers and students across the country.”
While converting the words of a textbook into braille is simple, it’s much more challenging to convert graphs or images into tactile diagrams.
Up to this point, volunteers and employees at Minnesota State Services for the Blind had no way to prevent original tactile diagrams from being destroyed by fire or natural disaster. The School of Engineering’s scanner can scan documents in less than two minutes, preserving the original indefinitely.
