At McLain High School, students in Cindy Haley’s Career Tech class are using their design skills and 3D printing to help an exceptional six-year-old boy named Brix. 

Brix was born with an extremely rare eye condition called Peters anomaly. Despite an extensive series of surgeries, he has lost vision in one eye and has limited sight in the other. With the possibility of future vision loss, his teacher and mom are preparing by teaching him Braille alongside his regular kindergarten lessons.

When Mrs. Haley heard about this story through Brix’s mom, Taylor, she started thinking about how her class could help.

She gathered her class and gave them this assignment: use their available resources to create tactile learning tools that help Brix learn English and braille at the same time. Working with Mr. Ollar in the on-site Tulsa Tech manufacturing lab, the students designed and printed a series of creative, hands-on aids – everything from braille playdough stamps and tactile puzzles to color-coded crayon caps with braille labels.

“It's a huge deal to me because I try to make connections to what we're doing here in this class to how we can use it out in the real world,” explained Haley. “This is a hands-on thing that the kids can see that it’s making an actual deep impact for someone in real life.”

“It’s amazing to know what we’re doing is going to help someone,” said McLain student Faith Fields. 

“It's changing how [my students] engage with the world, and it's bringing Brix’s world into the lives of his classmates,” said Haley. “It's a huge deal, and my kids are so sold on this. It's making them think about other ways that they can serve others.”