How Age Affects Hand-Eye Coordination
We need hand-eye coordination to perform many basic (and other not-so-basic) tasks throughout the day including writing, driving, playing sports, playing video or computer games, and many more! Here's how hand-eye coordination works:
- Images and information viewed by the eye are sent to the brain for processing.
- The brain then orders the information and responds by sending signals to the hand muscles through our nervous system.
- Upon receiving these signals, our hands work to complete the appropriate task needed for that particular situation.
Hand-Eye Coordination & Age
Hand-eye coordination begins developing during infancy when children learn to recognize their own hands and begin to grasp toys, and continues into middle childhood where children will master feeding and dressing themselves, writing, and other important tasks. By the age of nine, hand-eye coordination is fully developed. From this point forward, it is the child's own aptitude that will determine how well they will perform activities that require the use of hand-eye coordination. Additionally, the amount of exposure to and practice performing certain activities can cause a child or adult to excel at these activities.
Project Objective
In this science fair project, students explore the relationship between hand-eye coordination and age. They will test the hypothesis that older children have better hand-eye coordination than younger children using a sampling of boys and girls aged ten, a sampling of boys and girls aged fifteen, and a simple activity designed to test each participant's hand-eye coordination. The experiment overview includes sample test data and provides several extensions for a clearer picture of the relationship between age and hand-eye coordination.
For the full details, be sure to visit All Science Fair Projects!
