Need To Know
- Fifth graders at Global Idea School in Redmond, Washington, used AI-powered “vibe coding” to build a Braille 3D Generator that converts text into printable, tactile Braille models.
- The students were taught by Juan Lavista Ferres, Microsoft corporate VP and director of the AI for Good Lab, who has volunteered at the school for seven years.
- Before calling the project finished, the children interviewed Anne Taylor, principal program manager for Microsoft Accessibility, to make sure the tool would actually be useful for blind users.
A class of fifth graders in Redmond, Washington, has built a working accessibility tool that turns any sentence into a printable, raised-dot Braille model – and it stunned even their teacher, the head of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab.
The class is at Global Idea School, an independent, non-profit elementary school where Juan Lavista Ferres has been teaching computer science to elementary-age students for seven years. His day job is running Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab; the school is a side project he and his wife co-founded.
This year he introduced the fifth graders to vibe coding – a way of building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI write the code. The students used GitHub Spark, a tool from Microsoft-owned GitHub that turns natural-language prompts into working web applications…