The Touch and Learn Tray is a tray that will be used for children with learning disabilities to help improve basic reading and writing skills.  The bottom of the tray contains a magic medium, that has a salt-like texture, for children to write in with their fingers.  This allows them to get a textured sense of what they are doing and helps with the learning process.  The lid keeps the salt-like medium in place while closed.  The tray also contains peppermint wafers that are used to promote mood, motivation, and memory.

The Touch and Learn Tray  is being sponsored by Learning Tek, LLC, a health education marketer for children.  Learning Tek was founded by Rhonda Stump and Leslie Bootay.  They donate a percentage of all Learning Tek's sales to a charitable organization.  The Touch and Learn Tray was developed by Donna James, a middle school special education teacher.  Donna researched many topics and learned that a textured surface in conjunction with the peppermint scent dramatically improves a student's performance.  The peppermint scent promotes mood, motivation and memory.

The previous design was a blue wooden prototype tray that had a hinged lid that opens to reveal the writing surface.  The writing surface was a green turtle wax covered by thin PVC plastic.  It had scent dispensers that held the peppermint wafers.  Furthermore, the tray had a decorative border with colorful numbers and letters.

The improved tray design has had three key changes implemented.  The first change was implementing a salt-like writing surface medium.   The next change consisted of a new way to access the peppermint wafers.  The peppermint wafer design is similar to a Kraft^® Parmesan Cheese bottle and a CD-ROM drive.  The final change was to use the lid for holding interchangeable cards for the children to learn letters, numbers, and figures

For full-scale production run, the tray will be injection molded.  However, due to the high equipment costs, prototypes will be produced by some other means.  The cheapest and most effective way to create a small number of prototypes that look similar to the real Touch and Learn Tray is to create 1 prototype machined out of plastic.  Then, to create a rubber mold by using the machined plastic prototype as a pattern for the prototypes.  After the mold is created and the pattern is taken out, the mold will be able to produce identical prototypes of the machined parts by pouring polyethylene into the mold