Minnesota sends delegation of students to Braille Challenge for first time
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Four Minnesota students had the chance to show off their Braille skills in a one-of-a-kind competition. For the past 25 years, the Braille Challenge has tested students who are blind or visually impaired in Braille literacy. This year, Minnesota joined the competition.
In February, Minnesota held the state’s first regional event, which determined who would be sent to the international competition in Los Angeles. Four students qualified. In the past, students from Minnesota who wanted compete could take a test on their own to qualify.
The international competition, which took place in late June, includes tests for reading comprehension, charts and graphs, speed and accuracy, proofreading and spelling. And 11-year-old Minnesotan Sloan Peterson was there for the second time this year. Despite no regional competition, she took the test to qualify in 2022.
Sloan has lived with low vision her whole life due to a brain tumor, and she’s a star student said her teacher Traci Chur.
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“Sloan can read Braille. Sloan can do all of the activities in class. We just need to make them accessible,” Chur said, and highlighted the importance of teaching Braille to students with visual impairments. “They don’t need somebody there. They just need to know how to read Braille.”
While Braille is a more than 200-year-old tool, Chur said it’s not being replaced by technology. Learning Braille, she said, is still crucial for students who are blind or visually impaired. A commonly cited study from 1996 showed that those who were taught Braille from a young age had higher employment rates, were better educated and more financially self-sufficient.
Sloan, who besides being a Braille champ is also a cookbook author, already seems to be on that path.
“I like Braille. I like cooking a lot. And I decided that there wasn’t enough Braille cookbooks, so I wanted to write one,” she told MPR News guest host Clay Masters.
Next on her list: She wants to write a novel in Braille.
“A lot of people think that it’s like certain things are a lot harder for us, and they are harder, but we still do them anyway,” said Sloan. “Don’t say we can’t do it.”
