It may have been the worst speech synthesis since, well, the VoTrax (circa 1987), but it sounded beautiful because this room full of blind students had coded their BBC Microbits themselves to produce that "Hello!”

It was all part of our two-day camp with Cyber.org's Project Access on coding/robotics here at the Colorado Center for the Blind. We had ten participants - a mix of middle and high school students and our younger Independence Training Program (ITP) students.

Support Us Today

Join us in-person for a combined Learning Box and FAST rocket-building activity!

When:

October 16th, 2021
1:00 to 3:00 p.m.

Where:

Colorado Center for the Blind
2233 W. Shepperd Ave.
Littleton, CO 80120

Register by:

October 12, 2021

(Editor's Note: We don't blame you for wondering what is up with our summer programs for youth. The coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown orders put us into a scramble, affecting not only our youth programs, but seniors and the Independence Training Program, too. Here's an announcement from our Youth Services Director Martin Becerra-Miranda that should clear things up.)

by Martin Becerra-Miranda

Each spring, as plans for our Summer Youth programming come together, Executive Director Julie Deden eventually exclaims, “This is going to be the best summer program ever!” Her positivity, encouragement, and support have not wavered one bit through the COVID-19 pandemic.

These Denver high school students, Deya and Alma were two of the dozen middle school to college prep students who experienced all the sensory data of a spiny dog shark when they opened one up today at the Center. Well, except for taste. Thanks again to Arapahoe Community College’s Biology Professor Terry Harrison for leading these blind students through a meaningful lesson about anatomy – a lesson with the side benefit of learning that vision isn’t the only sense with which to do real science!

It was a relatively calm morning after yesterday’s Bomb Cyclone, with 8 to 12 inches of snow and extreme winds blowing the flakes sideways and into drifts. Admittedly we had to skate our way into the Center before eight this morning, climbing over ice boulders thrown onto the sidewalk along Prince Street by snowplows, but we are here. We are grateful not to be among the nearly 80,000 customers in the Metro area without power this morning.

And we are on for tomorrow’s shark dissection with Arapahoe Community College’s Terry Harrison. We’re plowing and digging and de-icing our way out in plenty of time for that! And the sharks come frozen anyway!

Whirling overhead at all times are stars, planets – whole galaxies. Humans have always wondered at them and about them. Blindness is no impediment to curiosity, including in the area of astronomy, nor is there any reason blind people can’t learn much in this field, often thought to be too visual. Some have even become astronomers themselves.

So, with the help of Arapahoe Community College Astronomy Coordinator and Instructor Jennifer Jones, this month’s FAST (Fun Activities and Skills Training) Friday program for blind youth will teach about the stars with tactile graphics of constellations, 3D printings of telescopes, and, finally, a trip outside to see what is in Friday night’s sky. Members of ACC’s Astronomy Club will be helping out too. We’ll also learn a little about the science of sonification as it applies to studying various astronomical phenomena.

March 9 will be Movie Night And our next FAST Friday at the Colorado Center for the Blind – our monthly activity for blind youth and their families. We’ll kick the evening off with pizza, then watch the documentary film, “Do You Dream in Color?” It follows four California high school students who are blind as they strive to follow their dreams. 1 hr 14 min with audio description. Popcorn provided. Discussion will follow.

April 13 will be Contact the Astronomy Constellations! we’ll have Arapahoe Community College Astronomy Instructor Jennifer Jones and her students work with us to understand the night sky, stars, constellations and everything! The evening will feature dozens of tactile graphics and 3D representations. The time will be determined, so stay tuned.

Access to concepts and information presented in graphical form has long been a challenge for blind college students. In the past couple of decades the surge in digitally-displayed content has, well, gone supernova. Thus, blind college students need to develop basic tactile literacy with two- and three-dimensional representations that their sighted peers may have learned much more informally through media such as picture books, television, film, or YouTube. Blind people learn how things look best by touch.

Descriptions are a stop-gap, but only that. Thus, one aspect of our College Prep class’s goal of preparing our students to be savvy and nimble in gaining access to their studies involves taking a look at the kinds of things colleges may throw in front of them and expect them to be able to interpret.

I-Fly Denver invited us over on Monday to take flight and learn about the science around wind tunnels and things like force and resistance. There was math involved, just saying.

Then we got to experience push and pull full-body, so to speak. Here’s a story from CBS Denver Channel 4 last night:

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2017/11/13/students-center-for-blind-skydiving/

Thanks to everyone at I-Fly Denver – we had a great time!