Feeling is Believing uses 3D printing to help make learning more accessible for blind and partially sighted students. Schools, teachers, families and individuals can take visual content from textbooks, worksheets or other learning materials and turn it into a physical 3D model that can be explored through touch. From historical monuments and buildings to geographical features, scientific concepts, diagrams and everyday objects, the aim is simple: take something that is difficult to understand through a two-dimensional image and bring it to life.
Much of education is highly visual. A textbook might contain a photograph of the Colosseum, a diagram of a volcano or an illustration showing the structure of an object, but these images can provide limited information to a student who cannot see them clearly or at all. Feeling is Believing provides another way to access that information, allowing students to feel shape, structure, scale and important features with their hands and build a more meaningful understanding of what is being taught.
The service is designed to be flexible around the needs of individual students and schools. You can send us an image, drawing, diagram or idea from a lesson or learning resource and we can explore how it could be transformed into a suitable 3D model. This could mean recreating an existing object, adapting a design to make important features easier to distinguish by touch, or developing a model specifically around the concept a student is learning.
Feeling is Believing is about more than making objects. It’s about creating opportunities for blind and partially sighted students to participate, explore and engage with learning in a way that works for them. By turning visual information into something that can be held and explored, we can help make concepts more tangible, encourage curiosity and give students another way to understand the world beyond the page.