Mr. Justin Kutscherousky, Dean of Innovation and Design; Mr. Omar Valdez, Innovation and Design Faculty Member; MJ Ervin ’23; and AJ Liang ’23 spent last Saturday morning with the fantastic crew at TEAMability. TEAMability works with children with disabilities around San Antonio to create a community for those that are differently abled. They also modify everyday items to make them easier to use and more accessible for their patients. These items can include anything from toys to electronics, and more. One of the difficulties that TEAMability runs into is that they are a non-profit and some of the supplies they need to modify items are extremely expensive, such as a button that allows people with little to no fine motor skills to operate mechanisms that have small switches or tiny controls. Some of these modified buttons can cost upward of $100 a piece! We showed the TEAMability staff how to make an affordable button out of household items for a fraction of the cost.

A couple of our seniors were integral in helping the members of this organization to craft these cost-saving buttons. Advanced I&D student MJ Ervin ’23 and engineering student AJ Liang ’23 spent their Saturday mornings making the lives of children around San Antonio a little easier. The next steps will be to have the rest of our I&D students work directly with some of the children from TEAMability in modifying toys that they’ll use almost every day.