Jessica Green / The SunflowerA March 22 story in WSU's student-run newspaper, The Sunflower, features three students who created a device to help a blind pre-med student.
Senior computer science major Daryl Claassen thought building a digital caliper for a blind student was going to be a weekend project.
"It's never as easy as it looks, but also there are a lot of things you actually don’t know until you start getting your hands dirty with a project," said Claassen, an Army infantry veteran and Airborne soldier.
After almost a month, Claassen and engineering students Richard St Aubin and Vlad Holovan finished the caliper and created a level playing field for pre-medical student Emily Schlenker. A caliper is a device that measures the distance between two opposite sides of an object.
“This gives me the opportunity to systematically take data and do it independently,” Schlenker said.
Schlenker was born blind. Many of her science classes require the device, which made classes difficult or impossible for her to take because it required being able to read the devices measurements.
“I don’t want to feel like other students are doing the bulk of the hands-on work for me,” Schlenker said.