If you're a legally blind college student, it can be quite a challenge to take notes in class. One college student who happens to be legally blind has come up with a solution.
The Note Taker. (YouTube/lockergnome)
The Imagine Cup is an international competition for student inventors. They work in teams and are asked to use technology to address difficult problems. The United States winner for the Imagine Cup is Team Note Taker. They will advance to the international competition to be held this summer.
We talk to David Hayden, the college student who leads the team. Hayden has been legally blind since birth and has been working with several different versions of adaptive technology as he has pursued college degrees in math and computer science. But study in fields like that tends to involve a lot of whiteboards being scribbled on by professors, sometimes across a very large lecture hall. Hayden found that the technology he had been using was coming up short. He describes one piece of equipment that required wearing a helmet that made him look like Darth Vader.
Note Taker, by contrast, is a simpler and more elegant solution. It essentially looks like a tablet computer with a camera attached. The user can control the camera, make it swivel around, zoom in or out, from the computer. The images from the camera appear on one half of the screen. On the other half is room to write down notes on what you see.
Also on this program, another installment of our popular segment O INTERNET WHAT HAST THOU WROUGHT. This time we take on the deeply odd world of Planking. It's the newest hottest way to lie absolutely still. Fun!
Check out the clip on you tube.
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