Friday, October 26, 2007

Infant stimulation



I put together a small infant stimulation toy for Fatma from BabyStrology.com. My nephew Waaiz used to have a toy like this in Dallas. So, inspired by that, I developed my own, based on card, printouts and some thread. I'm posting a couple of photos of the toy. Fatma seemed really fascinated with it. During the first few months of the infancy, she can see only high contrast such as black on white. Putting shapes in such high contrast helps her learn to focus, and perhaps even learn to differentiate between shapes. Later on, she will learn to recognize colors and we should have toys for her accordingly.
I think the design of this toy could've been a lot simpler if I started with a cardboard circle, placed holes at six equidistant points and hung down the stimulation patterns from these holes. Three of these holes could be used to host the suspension strings to the roof. I did this toy without any rulers and this better design would've required a ruler for equidistant point placement. Plus, I'd have had to make extra efforts to ensure that the threads that the stimulation patterns hung from were equal length so that the toy wouldnt tilt to one side. Anyway, a little bit of engineering mechanics for Fatma there. If you need some schematics for this design, just drop me an email.

No comments: