 Debbie Klassen, so Debbie, who is a Tier 3 consultant with CEP BC, and I met Debbie virtually for the first time yesterday, but I have a feeling that you're in for a treat of a new program that they're putting together. I think it's kind of a pilot working with 3D tactuals. I have done a little bit of promoting of 3D tactuals in the world of complex communication needs as well, so I'm really also interested in hearing your talk, so it was a happy thing for me in that regard that I get to be here today. So Debbie and I chatted. Some of you have heard, if you do have questions, and if you could post it in the chat, I will be monitoring the chat so that Debbie doesn't have to worry about that so much when she's doing her talk. So with that, I'm going to turn off my camera and I'm going to mute myself and take it away, Debbie. All right, thank you. Yeah, so I'm Debbie. I am a Tier 3 consultant here at CEP BC, which may not mean a whole lot to most of you, but what I do is I have students around the province who are assigned to my caseload who need assistive technology in order to participate in their classroom and in the curriculum. And so I help their teams figure out what technology they need and how to use it and how to use it towards inclusion, particularly. In the last couple of years, my focus has turned to vision. I am in the vision program at UBC this year, finishing in August, so that's exciting. But I've been focused on vision for a little while here at CEP BC already. And I've been working together with Flo Wong, who is a CEP BC vision teacher. She was going to be presenting today, but unfortunately she's injured her back. So here I am. But we did work together on this project. So this was a pilot project that we started last year. Actually, let me just start sharing my screen with you. There we go. Yeah, so our project was about 3D printing to support learning for students with visual impairments, and we were particularly looking at literacy. So this is me. I'm Debbie, you can email me if you have any questions later or any thoughts at D-class and at CEP BC.org. And this is Flo, who sadly is recovering from a back injury. So, yeah, we'll take a look at what our project was. I'll tell you a little bit about how it worked and things like that. And then interspersed throughout. I'll share some student stories, and we've got some great videos. If any of you have any questions, feel free to throw them into that chat box. I'm happy to answer any questions. And if you kind of want to go in a bit of a different direction, feel free. We can go wherever you want to, we can go wherever this takes us, but we'll start off with what the project looked like. So we started off with a few inquiry questions, and we were specifically looking at how 3D-printed objects could support literacy and concept development in students with visual impairments or deaf blindness. We wanted to look at whether or not there was value in the TBI's, having the opportunity to 3D-print on location and on demand. We also wondered whether 3D-printing was better suited to science and math rather than literacy. So we specifically looked at literacy. Some of our teams did a little bit outside of the literacy scope, but for the most part, we were looking at literacy. So we had five teams around the province, and every team had a student or a teacher of students with visual impairments. And then some teams also included an educational assistant, a brailist, possibly a design and drafting teacher, a resource teacher. And we started off by all coming together so that we could learn how to use the equipment together. So that picture that you see there is we were looking at calibrating the 3D printers. Each team was provided with either a MacBook or a Surface Pro, as well as the Ditto Pro 3D printer, a few tools, and then some of the filament in different colors. And project accountability happened through our professional learning community. So we had monthly online meetings. After that first meeting where we were all together, we met monthly after that online. And so each team had a blog online where they would talk about their experiences and share some of the things that they were up to. As well, a lot of the teams had an education partner in the school where they were located so that they had some backup. They could collaborate together and they could build a strong connection with the school community. And every team had slightly different goals. So there was a team who was looking at brail signage in the secondary school. A team wanted to look at miniature buildings. We had another team, well a couple of our teams were supporting literacy concept development for students with complex needs. So in that picture there you see we've got the three bears and three beds and chairs and bowls. So we wanted to specifically look at what would be criteria for our success. And we were looking at educator's standpoint, what success would look like for the student. We wanted to look at planning and decision making, the time that it took, cost, accountability, and then just general logistics of 3D printing. In terms of educator considerations, flow came across this concept of casual makers and thought that it really fit with us as teachers of students with visual impairments starting this 3D printing project. We didn't have prior experience with fabrication. We were not necessarily technology enthusiasts but we came into this with a lot of enthusiasm and optimism. But we faced a really steep learning curve because our background wasn't in things like 3D printing and we had limited experiences. And as we went through the process of this year-long project we realized that the TSBI may not be the person who should be producing these 3D printed objects. And you'll see why as I kind of go on and share about some of our stories. But it's possible that an alternate format producer such as a Brailleist or someone else might be the best person to support onsite 3D printing. And then looking at the student, what we printed and why we printed it would have to do with things like the student's past visual history, whether their visual impairment was congenital versus adventitious that definitely changed how the student would interact with the objects. And we looked at things like learning media preferences, haptic preferences, their experience and their knowledge about tactile graphic use. And then we really thought about understanding the scale in terms of size, the scale of objects from a visual impairment perspective. So things like how Clifford, the big red dog, is a dog. But when you actually compare him to Emily Elizabeth, she's quite a lot smaller. And so we would want to print something that had an accurate scale for the students to understand. We looked a lot into how we would decide what to print. And Josh Mille is a person who does a lot of 3D printing exploration for students with visual impairments in California. And his motto is that you print something that is too big, too small, too fragile or too dangerous to use the real object. And we would also add we would print things that are too imaginary that don't actually exist. And then too distant, remote or inaccessible. Now, you see a little figure of Groot there. We would also print things that are too expensive to purchase online or not possible to purchase online. Groot, however, is readily available to purchase. You want to compare the costs and the time of the printing to how much it would cost to purchase or to print out a model yourself. So we also looked at the decision-making tree from the diagram center in order to think about what we were going to print and if it was worth printing or not. In order to acquire the 3D modeling files, you can create a 3D model yourself or you can download a 3D model. Now, most TSBI's don't know how to create 3D, digital 3D models from scratch. I myself would love to be able to create things from scratch, but I'm not there yet in my learning myself. But you can also download 3D models. So most of our TBI's downloaded 3D models that already existed in repositories. There was a tiny bit of customization that was done, but again, that's another steep learning curve to customize those digital files. So this is an example of a file that we downloaded and then we did customize it. So this is a Braille nameplate and we were able to customize it so that it said something different, but that's a pretty steep learning curve to dive into that coding. This is an example of one of the 3D models that we found online and downloaded. So it was the Eiffel Tower. This is one that we actually scaled down a little bit because 3D printing is a really time consuming process. And as I'll mention later, it's something that you actually need to be present for. And so we had to import the model into the software that can be used with the 3D printers that we had. So in this case, it was Tinkering Suite. And this is where we could scale it down a little bit. And this is an example of our first print here. Oh, this is slicing it. So this is where we turn it from a model into something where the printer will know exactly where to lay out materials. So that is the model that we used. And it was saved onto an SD card. And then here's an example of the first attempt to print that Eiffel Tower. You can see that it's still moving, but nothing was happening. So what happened was that the filament jammed somewhere higher up in the mechanism. And so the print had kept going, but nothing was coming out. And this is another example of the Eiffel Tower. Now you can see that there was a piece that was laid down that actually lifted up and moved. And so the baseline of the adhesion of the filament sticking to the printing plate wasn't, it didn't stick well enough. And so part of the print lifted up and then it was building the print onto the wrong foundation. So we had to go again and here we have it. So there we have our completed Eiffel Tower and a successful print. So we used repositories such as Thingiverse, Tinkercad, B-Tactile, Smithsonian Digitization. And so there was a lot to think about as we downloaded these files that we used from these repositories. And sometimes we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for. I really, I really wanted to print out a good example of Clifford the Big Red Dog, for example, and Emily Elizabeth. And no one has created or had when I was looking for it a digital file for a 3D Clifford the Big Red Dog. Although I did find some other dogs, but nothing that was exactly Clifford. We definitely also found inconsistent quality. Some of the files were beautiful and printed amazing. And then there were some that were mismatched in size or were misshapen a little bit. And then scaling the objects again sometimes distorted the objects so that details would be lost. You really have to know exactly what you're doing when you're customizing a file that you found online for yourself. And so looking at costs, the printers that we've been using were about $3,000. Filament is relatively cheap. It's about $30 a roll. But cost also comes in things like comparing printing to finding commercially available products or models that are available through resource libraries, for example, and the cost of packaging and shipping those objects. But also we have to think about the filament for the unsuccessful prints as well as the successful one. So some of those Eiffel towers that didn't work out, for example. There were also misprints. So when our first layer of filament didn't adhere properly to the print bed, things would lift up in the corners or work a little bit. And we also ran into some of the filament feeding issues where the filament would get stuck in the tubes and things like that, and we'd have to start over. And then we have to think about the time that it takes, first of all, to search for the appropriate object to download it and prepare it, preparing the printers in order to print. So getting that adhesion ready, calibrating the machine, and then the time involved in babysitting the print. There are 3D printers that have video monitoring, and you can remotely stop the machine. Unfortunately, those aren't the printers that we were using. And as you can see here, we definitely had our share of misprints and difficulties. Yeah, so that was a day for the records. We had two printers going, and the same thing happened in both of them at roughly the same time. And this was a matter of teamwork where we were both looking at babysitting the machine and taking turns and things like that. But in between stages, we missed catching this right when it happened. And so with the hot printhead, the electronics, and the plastic filament, this is what happened. We had a couple of slugs of filament and filament backing up into the printhead. Fortunately, Flow is able to work with our amazing technicians to get our printers back into working shapes, so it worked out. Here are some examples of the miniatures that one of our teams built. So their intention was to introduce some architecture to their students with visual impairments and to compare the scale of different buildings and the shapes and things like that. And another team printed these deafblind communicators pretty successfully, and their students were really successful in using them. And there was another team that worked together with peers, so they had a drafting class who created these 3D printing models in order to support their classmates who had visual impairments. So there was a student who created Braille stickers to put on a keyboard and some puzzles and things like that. So those were really exciting opportunities for collaboration. And then another student built a 3D model of this school so that they could have a tactile map. And then one of the teams, as I mentioned earlier, they wanted to look at Braille signage. So there was a family that had three students who started going to a Chilliwack high school, and there was not Braille on any of the door labels. And so the students themselves were going to have planned to start printing 3D signs so that they could put Braille on all of the doors. And so they advocated for themselves. So these students wrote a letter to the principal for Sardis Secondary asking if they could do this and that they could put the signs up. Oh, I think maybe we have a question. There we go. And so they were told that, yes, they could, but one of the barriers to the students doing this 3D printing themselves is that in the Tinkering Suite software where we print, oh hello. I know. How are you? Sorry. Hi. Welcome. So there were no keyboard shortcuts for using the software. And so sorry. Hi, I'm going to mute people. So no worries. So flow together with the students emailed the software creators at Tinkering Suite and asked about shortcuts. And so they did develop some updated shortcuts for the software so that the students would be able to independently work on 3D printing their signs. So here you can see they're measuring the pre-existing signage at the schools. And this is an example of the coding that the students would have to do. So they would have to go in and change the Braille in the code. And so flow spent some time talking to the students about 3D printing and how it works. And so this is Dijon learning about 3D printing. So flow used, it's a 3D Scrabble game where you can stack the tiles one on top of another. And so in this example, flow is the code. So she's telling Dijon who is for all intents and purposes the 3D printer. She's telling him what to do when he's creating something. So it's really neat to see Dijon make those connections and how the code works to tell the computer or to tell the 3D printer what to do. We also learned that when we print Braille, we need to print it vertically. You can see the picture on the left there has horizontally printed Braille and it ends up being very sharp. So we showed a few people who are Braille readers the difference between the horizontally printed Braille and the vertically printed Braille. And it's way softer and smoother if you print it vertically. It's very sharp and could maybe cut fingers open a little bit if we print it horizontally. So that was a big learning piece for us. And now I'll show you some of the student's stories. So this is from a team who was looking at the three bears or Goldilocks and the three bears rather. And I think the three little pigs as well. So they were specifically thinking about scale and big medium and small for example of the mama bear, the papa bear, the mama bear, and the baby bear. And so this is a student who was learning about the story of the three bears. And so we have a video of him and we can't play this video. So I'm really sorry about that. We've got some technology issues going on. I apologize. But as they read the story of the three bears, he, Mary, who is his teacher of students with visual impairments, would hand him the corresponding piece in the story so that he could explore that piece and see how it was the same and different from the other pieces in the story. This is Penelope. She is another student who was exploring the 3D printed objects with, along with a story. They were working on reading the Gruffalo. And so Linda had printed out the characters from the Gruffalo for her. And it was really fascinating to see the discussion that the Gruffalo sparked for Penelope, particularly thinking about about the animals legs. Oh, let's see if this will pray for us. I'm going to just see if I can turn that volume up as high as possible, sorry. But you can see that her question, her question that in that first video was kind of snake walk because she was, they were talking about how the snake didn't have feet. I apologize that the sound is so low on this one. I'll see. I have everything turned up as loud as I can. So maybe I'll skip that last one. But the third video, they're also, they're looking at a 3D print of a mouse and talking about a mouse and whether a mouse can walk. So it was really interesting for Penelope to hold these objects and feel them and understand the connection between having legs and walking and wriggling. So I did a lot of research into what had already been created in terms of 3D printing and literacy. So I found that somebody had created 3D models of the book, Herald and the Purple Crayon, which led to a lot of discussions about what would be valuable in being 3D printed. So one of the difficulties with this one was that all of the files were of different sizes. So in order to make the image, the 3D printed image, relatively the same size, I had to blow some of them up by 300% in which case they ended up being quite thick. So there was a lot of inconsistency there. And as well, we talked about how useful it would be to have some of these images. It might be useful in terms of talking about art and talking about exploring what drawing is like and how people can be creative. But the 3D printed files didn't give a lot of information about what things actually looked like. So for example, in this image, Herald ended up kind of just being a blob of plastic. So that wasn't really helpful for students to use. And so because of the way the print was, where it was a lot of simple lines, the prints ended up curling up because of the of the way the heat worked. And so we decided to go again to not go with Herald and the purple crayon. You can see one of the examples here, but not everything was created in the 3D file either. So whoever had built these these digital files had chosen to leave certain parts of some of the images out. So that was also really interesting to see. I also found that somebody had created digital files for Good Night Moon. In this case, the files for all of the pages existed. And so we wanted to look at how useful it would be to have a 3D printed version of a book. And so we decided to create three different versions of the book. So I 3D printed the book. That's the one that you'll see, the image that you see in the center there. I made a tactile book as well, and then a book bag. And we introduced the three different versions of the story to a couple of students. So here this is items from the book bag. Now you can see the chair and the clock were among some of the items that I actually couldn't find something that was the right size or the right that had the right tactile information. So I ended up 3D printing some of the objects. I printed the clock, this, the chair, a little house, and I think there was there was one other that's just not in the in the picture. And this is Kelsey exploring the book bag. So she's checking out all the different story parts. And here we have the tactile book. This one had no 3D printing involved, but it included a cat made out of fur with some with some really thin plastic whiskers, etc. And this is Kelsey exploring that tactile book. So she's just reading the story and checking out the graphics. And so then after Kelsey read all of the books, she spoke with her TSVI about which one she liked better and why. It's still really hard to hear the sound. I'm wondering if you could maybe narrate over top and turn the sound off? Sure, no problem. So her teacher is describing the books that she looked at and asking her which one that she liked to read better. And Kelsey is saying that she liked the she liked the books where the the graphics were really close to the text. She didn't like the the book bag as much because the the parts were all separate. She also said that she liked the the 3D printed book the best because on the first page of that book here here's the book is from the end. On the first page for the book that you see there that top 3D printed image gives the perspective of the whole room that the that the book is that the book takes place in. So Kelsey is adventitiously blind. She lost her sight when she was about three years old and in this video she's seven. And her favorite was this one because it gave her the context of where the story was taking place. And she didn't know just from reading the book that it was a bunny that was narrating the story. But from this this 3D printed image she could tell that there was there was somebody in that bed and she learned that it was the bunny who was narrating the story. Yeah so this is a closer image of that first that first tactile graphic. And then this is Caden who also looked at all three books. This is just Caden talking about which one he liked best. And Caden liked the book bag best. He preferred all the different separate objects because he could explore them more thoroughly. And it was interesting that Caden is is congenitally blind. And so it was interesting to see that there might be differences based on the students visual history as to which graphics give them more information. And this one we ran out of we didn't actually have an image for but at the very end of our exploration we started to explore articulated prints. So we printed a 3D elephant and you just print the whole thing and then once you pull it off of the print bed you can actually its legs actually bend and its head moves a little bit. And so that was really exciting to see that you can build these these 3D printed models that that you don't have to put together anything you can print it and it articulates. So that was an exciting part of our learning that we did. So other learning that that we sort of gathered was that when you're trying to calibrate the 3D printer before you start to print, thermoform paper can work as a gauge to to figure out how close the printhead should be to the print bed. We learned a lot about the differences between printers for example having a heated build plate means that there's a lot less warping so instead of the filament cooling and bending it would it would lay flat for longer but those ones also took quite a lot longer to print. Our teams learned that the temperature in the room needs to be consistent so they some of our teams really found that cold weather impacted their print progress. Again we learned that we needed to print Braille vertically and when we printed the Braille plate vertically we learned that we needed to have a brim around the object so that it would hold that plate up because otherwise it would just get knocked over by the printhead and so it needed to have a skirt so a layer of filaments that was surrounded the print to keep it up and we learned a lot about that first layer adhesion so some teams found that blue painter's tape worked really really well we found hairspray was a good adhesive and then glue stick was pretty good but was kind of messy because it was a lot thicker. The prints end up being fragile and quite brittle so that again plays into what you're going to be printing and what you might want to print it for and they also tend to sometimes have sharp corners so it's important to be aware of who is going to be using that object and what they'll use it for. So we want to in the future so that we did this project last year and we have had some of our team members have chosen to carry on with the project this year and so we'll do a little bit we're going to be doing some more research with the project this year but it definitely brought to mind the questions about who's the best person to take ownership of the process it was a very time-consuming and intensive learning that we needed to do in order to in order to have successful prints and so this is something that we're still we haven't come to any solid conclusions about but for a TSBI to spend that much time sitting next to a 3D printer might not make the most sense in a school environment so there might be other people who would be better suited to actually creating the 3D prints. So we're going to continue with the the core group and we were we plan to invite others who were interested we didn't have any takers this year but that also pulls into question so how do these teams acquire a printer get the training and get the filament that they need to create these objects and so those are some things that will continue to be explored. So if you follow this link learningnetwork.setbc.org slash 3D printing this is where Flo and I blogged about our experiences with the 3D printing last year and so you'll see a lot of what the projects that I that I was talking about today and some of our learning experiences as well as links to the other teams blogs so you can find that in our aftershare. Does anyone have questions? Are any of your 3D printed color? Yes so our 3D printer the the the machines that we were using can only print in one color and so like one color at a time rather and so whatever we printed was just one color so for example the team who did the three little bears their prints were in black red and blue the the prints that I did for the for the Good Night Moon Book a lot of them were in that sort of honey color and clear and then some of them were in gray because we had to use a different 3D printer for it because those that was another example of inconsistent files. If I printed all of the the Good Night Moon files in the size that they were uploaded onto the internet I would have had all kinds of different sized plates and so some of them I had to print on a computer on our on a printer that had a heated bed in order for the print to actually be successful but yeah we did print in a variety of colors. Do you do work for every two public schools or Edmonton Catholic schools with these? We we are a BC Ministry of Education program and so all of our work is with within BC. We are happy to share our learning and share our files and things like that. We don't we haven't built a repository of items or anything like that at this point. We are good friends with the Provincial Resource Center for the Visually Impaired here in BC and so we've talked a little bit about 3D printing things for them to have as part of in part of their resource catalog but at this point we we don't have anything that are available for people to to borrow. So is there a website for their resource catalog? For the library of books here at CVI? Yeah so so they do have they do have a website the Provincial Resource Center for the Visually Impaired have a website that has their resource catalog but unfortunately that is only for for British Columbia. If you're interested in and using any of the files that you saw today in the presentation or that you'd see on our blog or something like that feel free to email me I'm happy to share any of those resources that that we used. Hi it's Kathy I'm just going to check in here and my grandson has woken up so he's joined us here. I wonder if you have explored any other options for 3D printing I know what we've done here in Edmonton is to use the Edmonton Public Library before they close down for renovations and I know again my experience is I've used the University of Alberta for the and they I mean I think what you guys have done is amazing and really interesting but it's also an onerous and complicated task. Absolutely. So this was an exploration about how useful 3D printed items would be in terms of literacy and so that that is part of the conversation that is starting to happen now is like who who should be responsible for doing this and how useful is it in in BC. I see somebody asked is there a goal for people who are continuing with the project focused on a certain curriculum so the team that was that had the students creating the signs themselves they they are continuing to 3D print those signs because they didn't get it all the way through their project so I know for them continuing with the signage is what they're working on and the other teams I think there are I think there are two other teams that were continuing to think about literacy at this point. Somebody suggested that you can change the filament color in the middle of a print and you would just get a bi-color object though because it would change in the middle. I know that for the printers that we used this wouldn't entirely be possible because once you change the filament it would over heat the spot where the printer paused and so we weren't able to change it but I know that some printers you have that ability to do so. My name is Janice. I'm wondering if the filaments can come in different types of plastic are there different fields to plastic? Yes there are so when when Flo and I were in Edmonton in May for the Canadian Vision Teachers Conference we chatted with some people and they actually gave us some filament that was a lot softer than what we've got. Unfortunately it didn't work in the 3D printers that we had because of the temperature that was required to use that filament but we we were hoping to be able to print to print some braille with that to see if that would be a better tactile feel than some of the harder plastic that we were using but yeah absolutely the different filaments. Yeah I spoke to them as well. We have had some of the Project Core tactile symbols made and they're a really nasty that was used in Calvary. It was a really nasty touch and I was happy to hear you say about the vertical versus horizontal for the braille because the horizontal was not good at all so I am not we're still playing around with some of those project core symbols because they all feel pretty much the same for some of the lower functioning kiddos and we've had some SLPs that have done some modifications so it's a process. Absolutely. Just a little bit but I've also been talking with Gretchen Hanser who was involved in the original DeafBlind project out of the University of Chapel Hill and that's where the Project Core stuff came from and Gretchen's going to be doing a couple of webinars for us and one of the things I wanted her to talk about is is her worry that in doing it with the 3D printers that perhaps lost a little bit too much information because the original the original symbols had lots more tactile information than just with plastic so to be continued and Debbie I would love you to join our webinars because I have some wonderful insights and questions. That sounds great. Well and that's also a really important caveat to make is that as you're introducing any of these 3D printed objects regardless of what it's for to students with visual impairments we have to keep in mind that these things all feel kind of like plastic like rough or smooth plastic and to be really cognitive of talking about how in reality sort of the the mouse that was printed for that one student a mouse doesn't feel like smooth plastic right. All right are there any other questions this has been really an interesting session for me to watch I really am rather happy that I got to pop in and Gretchen you guys for tackling you know taking on something and exploring and then are you going to write a final report will that be shared do you know. So I actually because I'm in the program at UBC I did write a paper on it and I actually I did post that on the blog so anybody is welcome to check check out our 3D printing blog and that's where all of our conclusions and our thoughts and our process or it's all that's where it all is so you're welcome to head over there and check it out. Where is that located? learningnetwork.setbc.org slash 3D printing. Right thank you. No worries. Any other thoughts or questions? Counting to 10 which is my usual way of doing it. All right well seeing none and Debbie you you did share your email as well at the beginning so if people do think of something that they want to ask you afterwards I'm sure they'll be able to do that as well. Absolutely and you can find both Flo and I on the set BC website in the contact page so feel free to find us there and our email information is there. Great good so thank you for reading thank you so much for your presentation and sharing with us and I couldn't agree more it was really fun and having always outsourced any 3D printing it was interesting to see the trials and tribulations so but lots of good learning lots of good learning so again I will say on behalf of all of the TBI's and I'm going to also share this with some other folks that are working on textual symbols because I think that as we share as you walk through the trials and tribulations we can learn and perhaps not don't have to do them and good insights about the fact that the cost effectiveness that goes down substantially about having TBI's yeah excellent thank you all for participating and yeah we will I don't I probably won't see you next time but I will see you around and Debbie it was nice nice to meet you all bye