Color blind test for kids NUMBERS series#

In high school, we had to run chemical titrations using methyl red indicator. To this day I still see noted speakers at conferences who have placed red writing on a green background in a PowerPoint presentation… without realising that they’re making it really hard for some of their audience to read their words.

Unfortunately, at the time I had to just squint and write down what I could, often to the detriment of my work. Using this on an old blackboard (which is really a dull green) made it very difficult to read anything. I can distinctly remember sitting in class during primary school whereby often the only chalk left in the room was a dull pink colour. Why? Well, you’d be surprised how it might be impacting your students. Perhaps it might also change some of the ways you present visual information too. Lets be up front: we’re not doctors and are not qualified to make a medical diagnosis… however, if you find that students clearly cannot read certain numbers in the Ishihara colour blindness tests it would be high recommended that you at least let the student know and from there decide if the student is happy letting their parent’s know. The reality is that 5 out of 100 males and 1 out of 100 females have my version of colour blindness and we generally lead quite normal lives, in that it’s not so much a complete lack of colour perception rather it’s more just a difficulty in determining various hues.īut what does this mean for the practising teacher? Well, perhaps it’s time to consider running one of these colour blind tests with your students. At this point, they’re understandably confused as the students expected a completely different answer. You could imagine that once students find out that I’m colour blind, invariably they can’t help but want to point out colours around the room in the hope to hear a strange answer … yet most of the time only to be disappointed as I keep naming most colours perfectly! You see, it is a standard misconception of students that all colour-blindness is alike and that we see things in ‘black and white’ (this condition whilst does exist is extremely rare!). It’s a sex-linked condition, in that the photopigment production genes are carried on the X chromosome and males only get one of those whereas females get both, causing males to show the condition more often (only one gene needs to be functional for normal colour vision to result). Basically, the cone-shaped structures within my retina have defective photopigments and as such don’t pick up light frequencies in the same way that the most of the population does. It also means that some blues and purples look similar as does some pinks and greys. This means that greens, reds, yellows, oranges and browns all can all look quite similar to me, especially when it is dim. My specific type of colour blindness is called deuteranomaly, which basically means that my retina at the back of my eye will not pick up much green light and instead is quite sensitive to reds, yellows and oranges. There are several types of colour blindness. Being a science teacher I couldn’t help myself but use my condition to my advantage, namely delving into the issue with real-life examples and how it actually works.ĭo both sides of the photo seem the same colour? Perhaps this might indicate colour deficiency. As the majority of the population sees the spectrum from red to violet, it is difficult for students to understand how colour perception can be different between people. They were in the middle of a unit covering the 5 senses and as I personally have red-green colour blindness, the kids were very interested trying to understand what I see when exposed to same frequencies of light as themselves. Only recently I was at school running a human body science incursion and the topic of vision & colour blindness was clearly a major interest with the students. The thing is, how often does the inability to perceive colours get picked up in class? Does it really have an impact on education, or is it just an oddity? As I myself have a form of red-green colour blindness, I thought I might dive deeper into this from a personal perspective as well as from a science educators point of view.

Often seen as the ‘dot test’, people can get an idea of how well they see colours by running themselves through a series of quick tests in which they need to pick out the numbers and patterns depicted. Many people are aware of the variety of colour blindness tests available that are based on the Ishihara Colour blindness tests plates developed by Dr Shinobu Ishihara in 1917. Just one of the many Ishihara Colour blindness tests

Color blind test for kids NUMBERS series#