#Color blindness test for kids series#

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.

#Color blindness test for kids series#

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