Making Math Together

With numbers and letters written in print, LEGO Braille Bricks are easy to use in inclusive settings. For math, the bricks’ mobility is another advantage.

LEGO Braille Bricks open up numerous possibilities for inclusive, playful activities, including math. Traditional braille-based math tools, such as cubarithm, can be difficult to handle at first. The difficulty of handling them adds to the complexity of understanding the exercise instructions. For visually impaired children, a math game can quickly lose its fun factor. 

With LEGO Braille Bricks, activities are more accessible and remain enjoyable.

Isabelle d’Allemagne, a specialised teacher, tested three math activities with a class of second graders (aged 7–8) that included two blind students and six sighted ones: Bingo! Hit the Target, Perfect10. “It’s incredibly easy to set up the numbers you want. This is something that any teacher, even one without specialised training, can implement in their classroom.”

Transcription

Often in maths,
with all the students,
we play a lot of maths games.
And with visually impaired students,
games are always
much more complicated to set up
because it requires a lot of rules,
a lot of organisation
and then it gets so heavy
that it’s no longer fun.
‘5 + 5 = 10 ’
‘ + 4…’
What we can see here is that
they’ve got to grips with the game easily
and so it can quite quickly
become a fun activity for them,
which they don’t have much opportunity to do.
All the activities you can do in a class, like Bingo
we realise that it’s easy to adapt.
With LEGO bricks
it’s very quick to put the numbers
and then they can
participate like the others.
And then when you change the card,
you change the numbers
like when you hand out
Bingo cards.
It’s the same thing and it’s easy to do.
This can be done in any class,
even with a non-specialist teacher.
‘Look, the 1 was in 2nd place’.
Braille material in maths
is cubarithms
which children sometimes find difficult to use.
LEGO make things much more accessible…

When adapting a game for visually impaired children, two aspects often require special attention: spatial orientation (blind children need more time to familiarise themselves with the materials) and understanding the rules.

For Bingo, a game that combines lottery and math, each child used materials suited to their needs: sighted children played with standard Bingo cards, while blind students used tactile cards made with LEGO Braille Bricks.
The students quickly reached the same level of ease with the materials.

For Hit the Target and Perfect 10, students worked in pairs, with each blind student paired with a sighted classmate. If needed, the sighted partner helps with tasks like organising the bricks and aligning them correctly for reading. This collaboration gave sighted students a chance to see how, once freed from spatial and material challenges, their blind classmates could excel at calculation.

Interacting with sighted peers is incredibly meaningful for blind students—and equally valuable for sighted children. Beyond academics, they learn a lot from collaborating and understanding one another.
They become curious and ask questions like, “How do they manage?”, “Can they see anything?”, or “What do they perceive?” These conversations help them better understand how to interact with their visually impaired classmates. They see everything they’re capable of doing and also what they cannot do and the challenges they face.