The idea is to help children realize by themselves they are not seeing as clear as they could. To do so, we gave students a pair of glasses made of paper. Instead of graduated lenses, Paper Glasses have pinholes that use the stenopeic effect to improve visual acuity.

The Stenopeic Effect is a physical optics effect that increases the depth of field. When allowing only a very narrow beam of light to enter the eye, there is no convergence, achieving clear vision at any distance.

Paper Glasses works as a simple vision test to keep children in school.

As its name suggests, Paper Glasses are made of 150gr. paper and 2mm. pinholes with a 2mm separation. To attach them into Santillana's School Guide, they have an extra 5cm piece of paper to be adhered to the guide as another sheet without using any extra materials.

On the previous page, there is an explanation directed to the student. We made sure to create a simple enough text with big letters that all children could understand; such text instructs them to inform their teacher if Paper Glasses gives them better focus on objects or if it helps them read better.

In the Teacher’s guide, we include information about the Stenopeic Effect and more detailed instructions about how to use Paper Glasses as a first visual test.

To design Paper Glasses we joined forces with optometrist, ophthalmologists, experts neurodevelopmental and of course, teachers.

We discovered that not any paper weight created the desired optical effect, but after a few test we achieved our goal.

On first trials, Paper Glasses identified 10% of the cases of students who need glasses without knowing it.

Due to Santillana’s wide reach, more than 3 million School Guides with Paper Glasses will be distributed all over the country, so we’re confident this initiative will have a positive impact in Mexican Education. Furthermore, once Save The Children takes the idea to countries in the same situation, Paper Glasses could give a clearer future to many children in 120 countries.

An estimate of 75% of school dropout cases in Mexico are related to visual impairment; but it’s a real challenge to reach all schools to apply eye examinations student by student, specially in isolated communities.