We are working with a girl named Addison, she’s a girl with special needs in 5th grade. She’s wheelchair bound and has limited control of her muscles. She really enjoys listening to music, especially tunes from Disney and DreamWorks. She loves the songs from Trolls and Frozen. We are making a 3D printed prototype touchboard so that she can touch a specific character and she can listen to the music from that film.
We went to an EAST student training at the University of Arkansas. Our instructor, Zack Spink, showed us the ins-and-outs of microcontrollers. We utilized the Bare Conductive microcontroller to create touch-sensitive 3D models to play music at Addison’s command. We pulled the character models from Thingiverse and then scaled them down, removed their lower half, as well as their back half of the 3D model. This allows the characters to sit flat on the touch board and for Addison to have easy access to their interactive touch sensors. Our first prototype was very small and did not have any color. Once we saw that Addison recognized the characters to the songs, we 3D printed larger models and painted them to look like their movie characters.
Our prototype is made in PLA, which we would really like to develop the final product in TPU to offer a softer model surface. We’ll also create a more sturdy project where the touch board is fully enclosed, the wires will be tucked within the body of the “tablet-like” board, and a lithium battery will be supplied to make it totally wireless. The final product will be presented to Mrs. Rothmeyere’s class and Addison will be able to use it for the remainder of the year and also take it to the middle school. We hope that this music tool will calm her nerves and reduce anxiety during the school day.