Test Your Dominant Side

Check out this cool experiment that will teach you more about how your body and brain work together. Test your dominant side by completing a series of challenges. Which hand do you write with? Which foot do you kick with? Do you have a dominant eye? Do you throw with one side of your body but kick with the other? Are you ambidextrous? Answer these questions and much more with this fun science experiment for kids.

Materials required:

A pen or pencil
Paper or a notepad to write your findings on
An empty tube (an old paper towel tube is good)
A cup of water
A small ball (or something soft you can throw)

Procedure:

Write ‘left’ or ‘right’ next to each task depending on what side you used/favoured.
When you’ve finished all the challenges review your results and make your own conclusions about which is your dominant eye, hand and foot.

Eye tests:

Which eye do you use to wink?
Which eye do you use to look through the empty tube?
Extend your arms in front of your body. Make a triangle shape using your fore fingers and thumbs. Bring your hands together, making the triangle smaller (about the size of a coin is good). Find a small object in the room and focus on it through the hole in your hands (using both eyes). Try closing just your left eye and then just your right, if your view of the object changed when you closed your left eye mark down ‘left’, if it changed when you closed your right eye mark down ‘right’.

Hand/Arm tests:

Which hand do you use to write?
Pick up the cup of water, which hand did you use?
Throw the ball, which arm did you use?

Foot/Leg tests:

Run forward and jump off one leg, which did you jump off?
Drop the ball on the ground and kick it, which foot did you use?

Reason:

So, what side do you favour? Are you left-handed or right-handed? Left footed or right footed? Is your right eye dominant or is it your left?

Around 90% of the world’s population is right-handed. Why most people favour the right side is not completely understood by scientists. Some think that the reason is related to which side of your brain you use for language. The right side of your body is controlled by the left side of your brain, and in around 90% of people the left side of the brain also controls language.

Others think the reason might have more to do with culture. The word ‘right’ is associated being correct and doing the right thing while the word ‘left’ originally meant ‘weak’. Favouring the right hand may have become a social development as more children were taught important skills by right-handed people and various tools were designed to be used with the right hand.

Around 80% of people are right footed and 70% favour their right eye. These percentages are lower than those who are right-handed and this could be because your body has more freedom of choice in choosing its favoured foot and eye than that of its favoured hand. In other words, you are more likely to be trained to use your right hand than your right foot and even more so than your right eye.

It’s not strange to find people who favour the opposite hand and foot (e.g. left hand and right foot), and some people are lucky enough to be ambidextrous, meaning they can use their left and right sides with equal skill.

Try testing others and coming to you on conclusions about what side the human body favours and why.

Extra: Are you more likely to be left-handed if one of your parents is left-handed? What are some of the possible disadvantages for left-handed people? (Tools, writing materials etc) Do left-handed people have an advantage in sports?

Interesting fact: In 2009, only 7% of the players in the NBA were left-handed while in 2008 around 26% of MLB pitchers were left-handed.

Is it better to be left-handed in some sports than others? What do you think?