When Jessica Weddington builds a tower with her new light blocks, you forget the odds were stacked against the 2-year-old when she was born.

Because she was born with congenital cataracts, glaucoma and a hole in her right retina, Jessica’s eyes looked like white rocks when she was born. After six surgeries — the first when she was just 3 weeks old — she’s fighting to see a child’s world. The Manchester toddler is vivacious, talkative and precocious, but still faces challenges. And when some of our engineering students heard about her, they decided to brighten her playtime.

Toddler Jessica Weddington experiments with the new lighting blocks built for her by our Mechanical Engineering students.

“The students did such a terrific job creating objects Jessica and other visually impaired children can use to develop their stacking skills,” says Filomena Palmer, director of Tennessee Early Intervention Systems, a grant-funded program housed here that assists young children with disabilities.

Each spring, students in Mechanical Engineering Professor Stephen Canfield’s senior design class ask TEIS to suggest toys or other devices that would help a child learn new skills or overcome developmental challenges. One of the projects completed this spring by students Karl Schmiede and Daniel Buckner was designing the blocks to help Jessica with her ability to stack objects.

Stacking blocks is not just child’s play. According to studies on children with visual impairments, children can suffer developmental setbacks if they don’t have stimulating objects to play with. Stacking builds fine motor development essential to learning daily living skills.

Jessica’s sense of depth perception causes cracks in the sidewalks to look like obstacles that need to be stepped over or avoided. When she walks down stairs, it's always with someone holding her hand as she chants, “Step, step, step,” to help keep her rhythm.

The neon-colored red, green and yellow blocks help her perceive the position of the blocks so that they are easier to play with. The blocks have great kid appeal; Jessica’s two sisters, Rachelle, 4, and Vanessa, 9 months, competed aggressively for her blocks when they saw them for the first time.

“Jessica does great considering all she’s been through,” says her mother, Cindy, who was born with similar, but less severe vision problems that resulted in cataract surgery and lens implants just a couple of years ago. In fact, Jessica’s uncle and grandmother also have dealt with genetically inherited vision disabilities.

Fitted with glasses at 6 weeks old, Jessica was referred to TEIS by the hospital where she was born. Now, she receives a visit every week from a case worker from Tennessee Infant/Parent Services, which also operates from our campus.

Jessica wears +20 lenses now, and she’s known for losing a few of them out of her frames because she loves to stay on the move. Doctors estimate that without these lenses, her vision is about 20/1,000.

“Her first words in the morning are, ‘Where’s my glasses?’” says Jessica’s father, Lee. “We won’t know for a few years just how much she’ll be able to see, but she’s overcome a lot with the help of the people at Tech. They’ve been great.”

Other projects completed by the students this spring include a tire swing for an autistic child, a chair for a child with dwarfism and a T-ball bat for a child with coordination and motor skill challenges.