Sept. 11, 2009—When early-childhood instructor Susannah Ford takes out her bucket of RFID-enabled toys at the Louisiana School for the Deaf, the children, ages three to five, gather quickly. These small cars, airplanes and stuffed animals look like any other toy, except each is equipped with a passive 125 kHz RFID tag to help the kids learn how to use sign language.

A small number of deaf students in Louisiana and Texas are using this new system, known as Language Acquisition Manipulatives Blending Early-childhood Research and Technology (LAMBERT), to learn American Sign Language. The system, designed and built by researchers at Southeastern University, was first developed in the fall of 2008. An expanded version of the system is now in the works, due to a $390,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).