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Jesus said, “I will build My Church…†There is a single organization that teaches the entire truth of the Bible, and is called to live by “every word of God.†Do you know how to find it? Christ said it would:

  • Teach “all things†He commanded
  • Have called out members set apart by truth
  • Be a “little flockâ€

12-Year-Old Inventor Helps the Blind…with Legos!

A seventh-grader in Santa Clara, California, solved a longstanding problem for people who cannot see: that printers for braille—a version of the alphabet that uses patterns of raised dots to represent letters—are extremely expensive, costing between $2,000 and $80,000.

The boy, Shubham Banerjee, came up with the idea while working on an assignment for his middle school science fair. Thinking beyond a typical school project, he decided to create a braille printer using a $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 electronics kit normally used to construct robots. His goal was to create the product with the lowest possible production cost.

Shubham was motivated by World Health Organization statistics: 285 million people in the world are visually impaired, 39 million of those are blind, and a full 90 percent of them live in developing countries.

On his website braigolabs.com, Shubham stated, “…in the mail that came to our house…I noticed those [mailings] that said, ‘Help the blind people with donations.’ I had no idea about Braille, so I asked my parents how blind people read and they said Google it! Upon further research, I discovered that typical Braille printers cost about $2,000 or even more, and I felt that was unnecessarily expensive for someone already at a disadvantage. Thus, I put my brain to work, and the first thing that came to mind was to create an alternative using my favorite toy.â€

“It took me 3 weeks and I broke and re-assembled 7 or so different types of models before settling on one and [programming] it…For the [next] couple of weeks, it was very long days for me. I started working on Braigo after I finished my homework and assignments and some days, I was awake till 2 am. But it was all worth it,†Shubham continued.

Weeks of trial-and-error went by until his Lego printer finally punched a single dot on the paper—the letter “A.†In a CNN interview, he told the interviewer he remembered calling out, “Mom…I can do this!â€

Shubham continued to develop the printer until it could print each letter in braille. By the time the science fair came, he had officially invented the printer.

His father, who works for Intel, made a $35,000 investment to help Shubham’s new company, called Braigo. Along with this investment, Intel invited him to make a televised appearance on its 2014 Capital Summit to speak about his invention.

Over the next few months, as Shubham continued to develop his printer into a market-ready version, he won special recognition from several companies and the California State Assembly. Shubham also won the 2014 Synopsys Outreach Foundation n+1 Prize for physical sciences from The Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Outreach Foundation, and was invited to give a demonstration on how to build and operate his Braigo printer at a SENSE-ational SCIENCE workshop. He has procured numerous other community and school awards as well as investment opportunities for his new device.

With resourcefulness, thinking outside of the box, and perseverance, Shubham proved you can even make a printer out of Legos—and help many people around the world!

 

Young Inventor: Shubham Banerjee holds Braigo, the braille printer he invented (Feb. 17, 2014).

Photo: CC By 3.0/nbanerjee/wikimedia commons