“A Touch of The Universe” is a non-profit project for a tactile astronomy kit addressed to children with vision impairments. The first 30 kits were sent to educators and teachers in underdeveloped countries in Americas, Asia and Africa. We are currently working on an extension of the project, "A Touch of Venus" that includes a 3D tactile Venus globe along with an activity book and video tutorials.
After developing and testing different different tactile astronomy educational materials we decided to put them together in a kit. Initially we produced 30 kits for “A Touch of The Universe” under the framework of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL). They were distributed among educators in underdeveloped countries of the Americas, Asia and Africa. Now the kit is growing with more tactile materials being developed in our new project "A Touch of Venus". Our goal is to help children and young adults in these countries to learn about astronomy, even if they are visually impaired. Our mission is to alleviate the lack of inclusive educational materials in these regions.
We are developing an extension to the "A Touch of the Universe" kit under the project "A Touch of Venus" that has been funded by the International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development (IAU - OAD).
The project will produce:
(1) A tactile 3D model of the planet Venus (can be downloaded from Downloads)
(2) A book with activities to be carried out with the Venus model (can be downloaded from Downloads).
(3) Online webinar to train educators/public communicators who are using the resources (see Tutorials)
(4) 20 printed sets of those resources (Venus 3D globe, activity book in Braille and normal print, and DVD with the recorded webinar) to be distributed among educators in developing countries
(5) Facebook group for exchange of information and experiences among the users
We have developed new 3D tactile globes of other rocky planets using the amazing software Mapelia (by Jordi Burguet).
From the Downloads tab you can now retrieve the following 3D tactile models ready to be printed:
* Tactile Mars (created from altitude data taken by NASA's Global Mars Surveyor).
* Tactile Mercury (created from NASA's Messenger topographic map) .
The on-line version of the kit includes:
(1) Half-sphere and soundtrack of the planetarium show "The Sky in Your Hands" .
(2) Tactile moon.
(3) Book with activities to be carried out with the half-sphere and the tactile moon
(4) "From Earth to the Universe (FETTU)" tactile Braille prints
(5) 3D tactile model of the planet Venus . A related activity book is under development.
(6) 3D tactile model of the planet Mars
(7) 3D tactile model of the planet Mercury
The project has been funded mainly by the International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development, with generous financial support from Universe Awareness (UNAWE), Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia, INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, EurAstro, Sociedad Española de Astronomia (SEA), NASA’s Chandra and Astronomers Without Borders (AWB).
A Touch of the Universe by University of Valencia Astronomical Observatory is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
