The Braille Factor Blocks (BFBs from now on) are intended for children who are blind to pick up a basic understanding of numbers, counting and numeracy while enjoying themselves alone or in groups playing with the blocks. The current design in the final stages of production has evolved over multiple iterations. The inspiration for BFBs is Color Factor Blocks (http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1256549/the-colour-factor-set-colour-factor-set-pollock-algernon-frederick/) which were inspired by Cuisenaire rods (https://sciencing.com/teach-math-cuisenaire-rods-7440838.html). I came across the reference to Color Factor blocks in a book by John Holt (have to check on this, it could be in a related book that I read during the early '90s) when I got interested in early childhood education soon after the birth of our triplets in 1990.
In addition to the joys and travails of parenting, the latter more borne by my wife, I was fascinated by the process of how children learn about the world around them. Here I had a living lab with two girls and a boy, in the cramped quarters of our housing at the Indian Institute of Science, watching them learn and grow. I also had this sense of the huge responsibility of a new parent that their learning and their careers and long term well being was in my hands and any decisions I take or not take will have a major impact on their lives. As a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, I was also grappling with the best ways of teaching and learning and was beginning to have serious questions about the schooling and pedagogy of Indian schools, of which I was a successful product. As part of the exploration of early education, I read several influential books including those of John Holt, Sylvia Ashton-Warne, and others. In one of the readings, Color Factor Blocks were mentioned as an exciting way for children to pick up the foundations of numeracy. In the days before the Web, word of mouth was the best source of such esoteric information. I do not recall the exact source, but one of the books had a description of Color Factor Blocks, and based on this description, my wife Priya and I got down to designing and building Color Factor Blocks from scratch. My contribution to the design and creation was minimal, with the whole project taken over by Priya: starting from deciding on the dimensions (1cm was too small to get done precisely in wood and so decided on 1in as the basic unit), deciding on the number of blocks in each size, getting the basic blocks cut to precise size by carpenters, personally sandpapering them to precise dimensions, doing a round of primer coating, mixing the colors based on the color scheme given by the book (odds in shades of pink and evens in shades of blue and factors of 2 and 3 mixed proportionately, and primes in gray), and hand painting every one of the near 200 blocks to precision, were all done by Priya. Clearly, this was a simple task and a break from the much more challenging task of bringing up a set of triplets, while the father was busy as an Assistant Professor who would escape into the welcoming and verdant IISc campus at any time of the day or night. The project was done in an incredibly short time in spite of the sheer amount of diligent work that was needed and the children had a run of free play with the blocks. All the blocks would fit in a hard-case suitcase that will be left in the small 10x10 room that was the play space of the children, removed of all furniture. I do not remember nor did we have the time to keep systematic logs of how the kids were introduced to the CFBs. But we recall that they were engaged in countless hours of play with the blocks, building a range of structures, using them to make-believe worlds.
In the times before cell phones and even digital cameras, the photos we have are very few, in fact just one.
Since this was not done as a systematic study, but an effort to create a playful environment for learning numbers, there are no conclusions that can be drawn about the efficacy or otherwise of the CFBs by themselves or in comparison to other methods of learning. Our three kids went through the standard Indian pedagogy that emphasized scoring marks in exams as the ultimate objective and were in a somewhat above average setting of a Kendriya Vidyalaya School at the IISc campus. None of them had any special difficulty in arithmetic or math and none of them was exceptionally good, except that my son Adithya had a fascination for numbers and I recall in the 1996 world cup cricket, he (had not turned 6) had the entire schedule on a large whiteboard with all the scores and was following the runs and keeping track of scores with glee.
In 2018, after I started work with Vision Empower Trust looking at STEM education for children who are blind or low vision, Priya and I had another discussion on how we might create toys for children who are blind to enhance their numeracy. And the first thing on our mind was Color Factor Blocks. Sadly, in one of our moves between houses, after our children had gone off to college, we had given away the suitcase with the color factor blocks to someone, and didn't even have a memory of who it was given to. Hence we could not bring the kit back and look at them in detail and only had our memories of the numbers and the colors, though having patiently painted every block by hand Priya had a good memory of the details.
We brainstormed about how the CFBs can be useful for blind children to get a tangible sense of numbers and arithmetic and even some geometry. The first thing was of course, colors didn't make sense to the blind, and low vision or color blind children will have different color perceptions than reason for the color schemes of the CFB. Further, given the availability of the Web and powerful search tools, we gathered that the color in the CFB and the color coding was not firmly established as having pedagogic value and there were some arguments as to how the assignment of different colors to different numbers was arbitrary and had no basis in the abstract notion of odd, even or prime and thus children were expected to have an alternate, completely artificial, mapping of numbers to colors. So we were happy to drop colors of the color factor blocks. However, in order for a child to get an accurate idea of the size of a block purely by holding it and examining it, we decided that the size of the block was inscribed in Braille on the blocks. A quick analysis, that given the rectangular shapes of the blocks, the only obvious places to locate the embossing uniformly on all blocks was at the two end sides of each block. And to distinguish between odd and even blocks we thought of some kind of tactile marking along the length of each block.
This was the progress we had made when Gesu India joined as an intern in June 2018 to take this idea forward.
There will be three more parts to the story till we reach the current date:
Braille Factor Blocks: the first designs and prototyping and user trials
BFB: the IP and design patent efforts
BFB: the revival and the new design with RLF