Sanskriti Dawle, Aman Srivastava, Dilip Ramesh and Saif Shaikh began Thinkerbell Labs. Its flagship product, Annie is a self-learning braille instrument which acts as a non-public tutor with audio-guided courses, to be had in more than one regional languages.
When Sanskriti Dawle, Aman Srivastava, Dilip Ramesh and Saif Shaikh had been of their 2nd 12 months of school at BITS Pilani, Goa, they teamed up as a part of Challenge Mudra. In combination, they created a braille alphabet track field on a Raspberry Pi, which is a credit score card-sized pc.
They then visited a blind college with their track field. “After we went there, our complete standpoint modified. We couldn’t consider that youngsters had been taking part in with one of these easy instrument. They had been and engaged within the product,” Sanskriti recollects.
This led them to analyze braille, which was their first advent to the space in braille literacy in India. After consulting with more than a few stakeholders, they recognized the primary factor — a scarcity of educators and out of date instructing strategies.
Braille training calls for important human involvement, with lecturers desiring to commit their complete consideration and time to scholars.
This motivated them to paintings within the box additional. They co-founded Thinkerbell Labs, an ed-tech platform in 2016.
And their first innovation is Annie, a braille instrument which goes like a non-public tutor.
Named after Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s instructor, the instrument has a braille show, keyboard, and a virtual braille slate that includes audio-guided courses in regional languages, in addition to English. It additionally options video games to familiarise kids with braille.
“Scholars regularly to find it very tricky and quite dull to be told braille which ends up in lots of them becoming bored in training. Annie is the arena’s first braille literacy resolution that is helping rookies to learn, write and sort braille in their very own regional languages,” says Saif, including that it provides a amusing and interactive enjoy for youngsters.
Saif provides that Thinkerbell Labs have established Annie good categories in additional than 80 studying centres throughout 16 states. They’ve additionally introduced their US variant ‘Polly’ in america and wish to extend to the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and the Heart East.
Watch this video to understand how Annie is making an attempt to make training inclusive:
Edited via Pranita Bhat