- 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.
For kids who had previously coded with block-based tools like Code.org, the shift was startling.
“Instead of having to type the code, we could just say English to the AI and it would make this whole app,” 10-year-old Grayson said.
The class settled on a single idea: a tool that would take any text and produce a 3D Braille model someone could print and feel with their fingers. They called it the Braille 3D Generator. The word “classroom,” typed in, comes out the other end as a row of raised dots ready to be exported and printed.
Some early attempts did not work. The students kept iterating until the prompts produced something usable. What surprised even Lavista Ferres was the leap from a browser-based app to a real, physical object – GitHub Spark normally generates React code for web applications, and he had not realized it could output 3D models until the kids pushed it that way.
“When I saw the output, I was like, ‘wow,'” he said. “I’ve been vibe coding for some time now. I wasn’t aware that we could do this.”
Before they called the project finished, the students did the part most adult engineering teams skip. They interviewed Anne Taylor, principal program manager for Microsoft Accessibility and an expert in Braille embossers – the machines that convert digital text into raised Braille on paper. Taylor walked them through what would actually help a blind user, and the children adjusted their tool based on her feedback.
They also visited Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab and saw the keyboards, game controllers, and other devices designed for users with disabilities.
For Grayson, the why has stayed with him as much as the how.
“I think it would be very good to help people with disabilities,” he said. “We’re trying to help the people who can’t see with this Braille project to make it more affordable, so they can tell areas easier – because it would be cheaper for areas to have Braille instead of having to go through a really expensive process.”
Lavista Ferres, a 17-year Microsoft veteran who became a lab director in 2019, is open about where this might lead. The kids in his class, he has said, could be future Microsoft colleagues, because what they have built is not a classroom demo. It is a real-world applied solution.
“We live in an amazing time,” he said.
Other fifth graders who worked on the project included Valentin, Ella, Hunter, and Julian, alongside Grayson. They are now the youngest students entered in MIT’s “AI for a Better World” competition.
