Venture Highlights: Communication Venture

The Communication Venture met community partner Aspen Speech Therapy in Windsor, learning how speech and occupational therapy help people improve their communication skills.

We had a thorough tour of Aspen Speech Therapy in Windsor, and the therapists are very excited about our offer to help them by making some switch-adapted toys for their general use and some as gifts for their patients who otherwise would not have access to them at home.We are ready to start practicing adapting toys. If you are ready to part with any stuffed toys that move, make noise, or light up when touched/pressed, we would love to use them to learn the wiring skills we need to make our final products. Please send them in with your students anytime between now and next Friday. Thank you! If your neighborhood has a garage sale, your student could explain our project and see if they have any that they’d be willing to donate. We can work with stuffed toys (where we can open a seam to access wires), but not toys in solid plastic cases.

If you’re curious about our final product goals or would like to see the types of toys we’re looking for, this star and elephant are the toys that your students have chosen to adapt (once they practice on old toys to get good at it!). The ones we donate to patients have to be brand new since many patients are immunocompromised; I’ll try to get good pictures of our sterile-as-it-can-be stuffed animal operating room when we’re working on them.