Colours and Screens

1. What your child learns and why

A screen makes all its colours from three lights — red, green and blue (RGB). Each shines at a strength from 0 to 255, and the lights add up: red + green = yellow, all three at full strength = white. Your child mixes lights in a small mixer and sees that a screen colour is stored as three numbers. This is the basis of every digital picture.

2. Three questions for dinner

• “How does a screen make yellow when there is no yellow paint inside?”
• “How would we describe a colour to someone who cannot see it?”
• “Why does the same film sometimes look different in colour on the phone and on the TV?” (Devices show colours a little differently.)

3. 10 minutes together, no screen — lights and a magnifier

1. Open a big white or yellow patch on the phone, brightness medium. Your child looks through the magnifier for a few seconds, without pressing the glass on the screen. On many screens you can see rows of tiny coloured dots or stripes; on some it is hard — that is normal.
2. Put the magnifier down and look out of the window at something far away.
3. On paper, paint a red patch and a green patch that overlap. Ask: “What colour appears? Is it the same as from the lights?” Light and paint mix in different ways.

4. What success looks like

• Your child names the three lights and says what red + green make and what all three together make.
• Shows you in the mixer how to make orange (a lot of red, a little green, no blue).

5. Common difficulties

• Expects red + green = brown, as with paints → “Paint and light are not the same. Let's see what the mixer says.”
• Cannot see the dots through the magnifier → “That is normal — the dots are very small. Try a brighter patch, another screen, or just look at the drawing in the lesson.”

Say: “Check and fix — that is how engineers work too.” Avoid comparisons with other children.

6. Safety

Use the magnifier only on a screen, never toward the sun or a bright lamp. Do not press the glass against the screen. Do not look at a screen from very close for long: a short look, then look at something far away. Nothing wet on the device.

7. Where to go next

Next lesson: DB-VK-09 “Mouse and Windows” · Back: DB-VK-07 “Sound from Numbers” · Ask a grandparent: “Do you remember the first colour television?”

You do not need to know the answer. Say: “Let's check together.”