Shubham Banerjee is all but 13 years old. He lives in San Jose, California with his parents. He goes to school and loves it, especially science. Everything about him sounds normal except this: Shubham, for his 7th-grade school science fair project, made a Braille Printer – a fully functional Braille printer!

Braille is a system of dots and dashes punched on paper that visually impaired people use to read. It was invented by a man named Louis Braille. A braille printer prints the text as bumps on top of the paper. These bumps are interpreted by the blind people by a touch of the hand! Braille printer is also known as a braille embosser. It is of great help to visually impaired people.

But it is very expensive.

One day Shubham asked his father about how blind people read. His father told him, “Go Google it!”. Shubham read it up on the internet. He came to know about the challenges that millions of blind people across the world face to read. Their books are not easily available, and they can’t read everything they want to as the basic Braille printers are very expensive.

“After studying the Braille language; I understood that a visually impaired individual feels through his/her fingers the bumps on paper through a combination of 6 dots. If we could make a printer that prints (by making holes in a paper) as a mirror image of the letter and when flipping the page we should be able to translate letters into BRAILLE.” said Shubham. To implement the idea, Shubham bought a Lego robotics kit that costed around $350. He successfully built a Braille printer out of it. When he submitted it in his 7th-grade science fair, it won first prize. Since then there has been no looking back for him. Shubham has won many accolades for his effort and was even invited to The White House.

A very big technology company Intel Corp. have given money to Shubham to work on this project at a large scale and also for developing other new technologies. The wonder boy has also launched his firm – Braigolabs, with the motto – “Technology should help us to make our life easier and not become a burden due to the high cost. ”

What is so special about this invention?

This invention is special because it shows that young kids like you care for our society. You are the future of our world, and your good intentions will make this world a better place.