Sanskriti Dawle, Aman Srivastava, Dilip Ramesh and Saif Shaikh began Thinkerbell Labs. Its flagship product, Annie is a self-learning braille machine which acts as a private tutor with audio-guided classes, obtainable in a number of regional languages.
When Sanskriti Dawle, Aman Srivastava, Dilip Ramesh and Saif Shaikh have been of their second 12 months of school at BITS Pilani, Goa, they teamed up as a part of Undertaking Mudra. Collectively, they created a braille alphabet music field on a Raspberry Pi, which is a credit score card-sized laptop.
They then visited a blind faculty with their music field. “After we went there, our complete perspective modified. We couldn’t consider that youngsters have been enjoying with such a easy machine. They have been and engaged within the product,” Sanskriti recollects.
This led them to analysis braille, which turned their first introduction to the hole in braille literacy in India. After consulting with numerous stakeholders, they recognized the primary concern — a scarcity of educators and outdated instructing strategies.
Braille training calls for vital human involvement, with lecturers needing to dedicate their full consideration and time to college students.
This motivated them to work within the discipline additional. They co-founded Thinkerbell Labs, an ed-tech platform in 2016.
And their first innovation is Annie, a braille machine which works like a private tutor.
Named after Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s trainer, the machine has a braille show, keyboard, and a digital braille slate that comes with audio-guided classes in regional languages, in addition to English. It additionally options video games to familiarise youngsters with braille.
“College students usually discover it very tough and slightly boring to study braille which leads to a lot of them dropping curiosity in training. Annie is the world’s first braille literacy answer that helps learners to learn, write and sort braille in their very own regional languages,” says Saif, including that it affords a enjoyable and interactive expertise for kids.
Saif provides that Thinkerbell Labs have established Annie sensible courses in additional than 80 studying centres throughout 16 states. They’ve additionally launched their US variant ‘Polly’ in america and need to increase to the UK, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and the Center East.
Watch this video to know the way Annie is making an attempt to make training inclusive:
Edited by Pranita Bhat