Team:Gaston Day School/Engineering
Engineering Success: 3D Design for Students with Disabilities and Visual Impairments
We know from teachers and students with visual and motor difficulties that using a graduated cylinder is a significant difficulty in lab sciences. Our engineering design was made to help people
with visual or physical disabilities have better access to lab sciences. We designed our measuring tool so people with visual disabilities who would have a hard time seeing numbers on a regular graduated cylinder could use it. We did this by making it a predetermined size where you just fill up the whole thing. There is also a high contrast color between the number and the measuring tool itself so people can better see the number. We also put a braille label on the tool. We made a wide pyramidal base so people with motor control disabilities would have a smaller chance of spilling the liquid in the cylinder.
With our design we used the fact that one square centimeter equals one milliliter and we created a prototype of a graduated cylinder shaped like a prism. The interior is a square centimeter in area to complete the requirements and five centimeters deep. The walls are 2 millimeters thick and the base is 3 millimeters thick. We wanted to design a separate base to hold it up and in place, so we designed a separate base to hold it up and in place and put a hole in the middle with dimensions one millimeter wider and longer than the walls and deep enough to hold half of the prism. It is quite stable and will not fall if hit. We designed a “5” placed on one side near the top and the braille word for “five” on an adjacent side of the prism at the same height. We came up with two possibilities one was single sized cylinders the other would have graduations that are raised and of contrasting color.
After each round of testing, we took the results and modified the design of the device based on the feedback and printed a new version. After testing a final model and directly comparing measuring out 5 mL of water using the 5 mL cuboid to using a standard plastic 10 mL graduated cylinder, the students' response was: “This is SO MUCH easier!”
Future Modifications Planned
1. Change the non-skid surface on the bottom of the base to a one that is not latex (request from the OT since several of her clients have latex allergies).
2. Print and test a 10 mL cuboid and alter the base so that it will support a taller device without tipping, possibly by adding legs to the current square design.
3. Design larger volume cuboids by increasing the side length of the cuboid rather than increasing height.