Camp Sunshine Toy Design
Camp Sunshine
Camp Sunshine is a program that supports families with children battling life-threatening illnesses. They provide families opportunities to attend illness-specific information sessions and support groups with other families. In addition, they provide relaxing and fun recreational activities for families and their children along the Sebago Lake in Maine.
In the summer of 2018, I organized and led a group of fellow robotics students from my high school to design and donate toys to Camp Sunshine. During the summer we designed toys for children battling retinoblastoma (a form of eye cancer). While this project was done in high school and may be simplistic, I am still proud of what we accomplished. This project is representative of my love of engineering and my desire to help others from an early age.
Blind Checkers
One of the first toys we designed was a game of checkers that was designed specifically for blind users. For this game, we made two custom checkers pieces and a checkerboard.
For the two checker pieces we made circular and triangular checker pieces. We wanted these checkers to feel distinctly different, so users to differentiate each other's checker pieces purely by touch. On each side of the checker piece, we had a flat side for the regular side and an indented side with a crown for the king's side. We made each side of the checker piece feel different so users could easily tell the difference between the two sides. These checker pieces were 3D printed.
For the checkerboard, we made a wooden board with indented grids and circular slots for the checker pieces. The indented grids were used as guides to allow users to determine where each square on the board is. The circular slots were used to place each of the checker pieces in place and prevent them from sliding around as users touched the board. This board was machined on a CNC router.
Blind Connect 4
The other game we designed was a modified version of Connect 4. For this game we took a standard Connect 4 game and replaced the tokens with custom 3D printed tokens. For our tokens, we had two different designs. One of the tokens are triangular indents on each side and the other token had circular indents on each side. This allowed users to feel the tokens and easily determine each other's tokens purely through touch.