Designing an Educational Toys for Special Needs children

1. Designing an Educational Toys for Special Needs children • Abdullah Al Qaydi, Kamal Al Khuffash,Syed Ghofran Hashmi • INTRODUCTION • The team received a client letter from the care center in Abu Dhabi requesting designs for toys to be used in the learning process for the children in the center. The team conducted a research and found that most of the special needs children have some difficulties developing their senses and by communicating with the client we found that the children are being taught individually. By communicating with the center and management, examining the classrooms and conducting the research, the team was able to come up with the following revised client statement. • “The team should build a safe, portable, affordable, easy to use and reliable educational toy to support the learning experience of the children with autism and down syndrome in the Special Care Center.” • How It Works • The user activates the circuit by touching the metal bar in the outer cover which is connected to the activating subsystem. The activating subsystem activated the light subsystem and the sound subsystem . The sound subsystem is connected to the speakers through an amplifier to enlarge the sound so it will be recognizable by the user. The whole system is energized by a 12V rechargeable battery. • FUTURE WORK • The team will carry the design to the final stage where the final modifications requested by the client and some of the necessary modification to ensure the reliability of the design will be applied and other modification to rise the quality of the design. Those modifications are: • Replace the Activating subsystem. • Minimize the size of the device. • Inserting the Display screen. • Implement the use of microcontroller. • Conceptual Designs • The team came up with four conceptual designs which are the color box, the fruit box, the writing board and the reading box. The color box is used to help the student in recognizing colors and teach them the pronunciation of each color name. The fruit box is used to help in recognizing the smells and pronunciation for the fruits names. The writing board helps in developing the writing skills for the alphabetical letters and the name of some objects starting with that letter. The reading book teaches the pronunciation of some words and develop the reading skills. • By using an evaluation matrix the four designs were compared and the color box was found to be the best design that suits the client and the user requirements. Therefore, the team proceeded with the color box. • CONCLUSION • The work in this project was initiated by a client letter from the special care center to the SEEK team requesting some educational toys to be used in the learning process of the children in the center. The team generated four conceptual designs and chose the best one to carry on with to the detailed design. Some modifications were applied to the device in several stags. The team is working on applying some further modifications to the design to rise its quality and reliability. • Modifications • Many modifications was applied to the design before building the prototype such as: • The display screen was replaced by lights in order to decrease the cost of the Prototype. • Multi speakers are used instead of one speaker to avoid the contradiction between multi signals. • ACKNOWLEGEMENTS • The SEEK team would like to thank the Electrical Engineering Instructors In the petroleum institute, namely “Mr. Lisle Dias and Mr. Mohammed Serhan” for their help in many of the designing stages.