News

Volume 6 Issue 1 - June 15, 2009

The ‘Train’ of Thoughts

D.N.I.S. News Network, India: A toy train that will help children with visual impairment enhance their vocabulary. That is what students of M.S. Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies, Bangalore have designed.

Built on the lines of the popular word game, Scrabble, this game has letter blocks and players have to arrange the blocks to form a train representing a word. The player who manages to make the longer word gets all the letters. The player, who collects the maximum number of letters by forming different words, finally gets the engine of the train.

The product has been designed by Anthony V.P., Joseph F.B., Manoj Kumar Sahu, Sanath Kumar S., Shivakumar, Vinu Jose, Viswamurthy and Vivek S. under the guidance of Jayakumar, lecturer at the product design centre of the school.

“We had 100 concepts and zeroed in on seven, before finalising this educational toy. The game is designed specially for the visually impaired children, aged between eight and twelve,” said Vivek.

“One major objective that is served by the game is that it builds the vocabulary of the students, who get to think of different words, thereby improving their spelling abilities. They also relate the words to what they mean adding to the children’s knowledge,” he added.

The game was finalised after a rigorous research conducted at the National Association for the Blind, as also other schools for the blind.