Secondary school students at the Sincan Şehit Abdullah Büyüksoy Science and Arts Center who participated in the TEKNOFEST 2020 organized this year in the southeastern industrial city of Gaziantep under the coordination of the Turkey Technology Team Foundation (T3 Foundation) and the Ministry of Industry and Technology, won the first prize in the "Technological Social Innovation for the Benefit of Humanity" category. Pixel Engineers Team designed an important project that will allow visually challenged people to make connection with colors. They managed to prepare color codes that can be used as an extension of the Braille Alphabet.
"Braille Coded Color Pixels" project designed by Ebrar Gökçe Kızılgül and Emir Sağdıç under the guidance of Technology Design teacher Melike Güler Okur aims at eliminating the color conception that visually challenged people experience in many fields. Today, some digital applications could give information about colors to visually challenged people but when this award-winning project is introduced to the international arena, visually challenged people from all over the world will be able to learn about colors by using only color alphabet. The project which includes only 8 main colors as a part of its first stage is designed in a way that it can be integrated to different parts of life varying from arts to the education curriculum.
"This project will allow visually challenged people to define and recognize colors without assistance form anyone by using color codes"
Explaining that they decided to name their team as the Pixel Engineers as they used pixels in their project, 11 year old Emir Sağdıç said, "I asked our teacher if we could participate in the Teknofest with a project, she said yes and we started working. We realized that we were having fun as soon as we started to achieve things. First of all, we made the drawing of our cubes by using the Tinkercad program. We formed codes on calibration cubes and printed these cubes on other cubes. And then, we introduced cubes to visually handicapped people. They said the cubes were too high to perceive with hand. We reduced the height of the cubes. This time, calibration cubes were too large. We formed cubes in 1x1 measure. This time, visually handicapped people said their hands are too big for the cubes. Finally, we discovered the right size. This project will allow visually challenged people to define and recognize colors without any assistance from anyone by using color codes. While I was working on the project, I realized that visually handicapped people have no color perception. They want to know the color of clothes they want to buy. They have to ask this to other people when they are shopping and some people do not help them. This is very bad. Due to this reason, we wanted to disseminate our project. Color codes could be printed on any product you can think of. Even if you print this code on a very small table, visually handicapped people can perceive the color of that table.
Minister of National Education Selçuk put his signature under the project
Mentioning the purpose of the project, Ebrar Gökçe Kızılgül said "We tried to produce something that will be useful for people. First of all, we aim at introducing ourselves and then carry this project to the international level. We are the first in the world. We made various different researches. We looked for sources and checked if there is any other project which is similar to our project. We did not come across any similar project for the visually handicapped people. On the day of the contest, we were told that we had won the "Best Presentation Award." We were happy but we believed that our project did not win any other prize. When it was announced that we were the winners of the award, we experienced joy and excitement at the same time. Minister of National Education Ziya Selçuk visited our stand and he said he wanted to put his signature under our project. Our goal is to be accessible and universal. My recommendation to my friends is not to be afraid of curiosity and research all the time."
Meanwhile, project guide Sincan Şehit Abdullah Büyüksoy Science and Arts Center Technology and Design Teacher Melike Güler Okur went on to say:
"We visited the Mitat Enç School for the Visually Challenged students as part of our project. We had the opportunity to learn about the textile materials they use and realized that these materials do not include color distinction detail. We formed our project according to this exclusion. We formed a color alphabet like the Braille alphabet. We defined a code for every color and processed this code by using the Tinkercad program.
Team Pixel Engineers received the award from the Minister of Interior Affairs Süleyman Soylu.