I bring Ava and her soundboard to work every day, and the old setup of velcroing the FP hextiles to a board (that I could just pick up and go) was about to be too small for the number of tiles I needed. So rather than get a bigger board and deal with the awkwardness of transporting that everyday, I decided to make something more travel friendly. I work in a machine shop and we're very slow right now, so I went ahead and made my own hextiles.

Here is the old setup. Was light and worked really well for this number of tiles, but becomes impractical as the soundboard grows.

Here is the new setup. It's made out of wood with pockets milled out for the buttons and also for magnets in the sides. I was intending to stain and paint them, but decided partway though it was too much effort and took too long for drying so I instead used vinyl. And to try and mimic the different colors and patters of the FP tiles, I made the different grouping of stickers on the buttons different colors and added a larger symbol on the tile itself.

Here's the approximation of what Ava potentially sees using the color blindness simulator:

The button colors are probably too close in appearance to each other and making the symbols different colors might also help, but I'm going to let Ava get used to this for a bit before I do that. 

If people are interested, I plan on making more tiles next week if we're still slow, and can post some pictures and video of programming them on the computer and the machine running through the code and cutting the tiles.

Learner Name: Ava

Age: 2 yr

Teacher Name: Melissa

Started Learning Word Buttons: October 19 2020

Number of Words: 34

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