Viability of hand-eye coordination: Masroor Khan, Tiffin School

Hand-eye coordination is a complex cognitive ability that allows us to perform activities that require the use of our hands and eyes at the same time, such as driving a car or catching a ball. We use our hands to catch it and our eyes to track the direction of the ball.

This is used to allow our eyes to perceive information that helps guide our hands to perform movements. For example, when you see a ball moving to the right, you instinctively move your arms to the right without thinking. It sounds simple, but improving this skill and honing it can have real benefits in everyday life.

Almost all activities we do use hand-eye coordination to some degree. For example, when you write on paper or type on a keyboard. We use visual information to guide our hand movement, or when we see a mistake in our writing, we naturally click on the word to correct it.

Hand-eye coordination is also very important for athletes and sportsmen, especially for games like cricket and basketball.

Although it looks normal, with minor changes in our visual or motor systems, such as crossed eyes or damage to important motor areas of the brain, it can cause many problems with hand-eye coordination.
But what are the problems? As we also age, our hand-eye coordination declines dramatically. This can cause us to write sloppily, make frequent mistakes when typing important documents, for example, or have difficulty driving and playing sports, or even something as simple as just catching a ball.

Poor motor coordination is also another difficulty commonly faced by children with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Children who experience these motor difficulties often show deficits in everyday tasks that require the coordination of complex movements, often leading to them being labeled as clumsy. Even something as simple as spilling juice when pouring it can result from a lack of fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

But what can we do to improve it? There are two things in particular that have greatly increased my hand-eye coordination. These improvements also add to the opportunity for young children to play sports at a higher and more professional level.
The first one is simple, but it’s just throwing a ball at a wall and catching it. Simply doing this for 20-30 minutes or less a day can produce significant improvements.
Another is a sport called Speed ​​Stacking, which involves stacking a set of 12 cups and putting them down. This sport tests dexterity, fine motor skills and serious hand-eye coordination.

It was even adopted in many schools in the UK and USA a few years ago to improve hand-eye coordination and ambidexterity, ie the ability to use both left and right hands equally, as you are forced to use both hands when stacking cups.
Research carried out by the sports associations themselves found that they found “significant improvements” in both reaction time, hand-eye coordination and ambidexterity, which are key life skills that are definitely worth learning.

No doubt these two helped a lot, but there are many other practices you can do. Experiment with them because hand-eye coordination is one of the best skills you can learn.