Young innovators, big impact

She’s 11, has dyslexia, and just designed glasses that could change how millions read

Millie Childs used to find reading scary. Letters would blur and shift; words on a whiteboard felt like a puzzle nobody else seemed to have trouble solving. Millie, from Salford in Greater Manchester, has dyslexia – a learning difference that affects roughly one in ten people in the UK, her homecountry, and tens of millions more worldwide. Instead of waiting for someone to make things easier, she decided to do it herself. The result is Rainbow Glasses: a pair of colour-changing spectacles with LED-powered lenses that can switch between red, green or blue at the press of a button, allowing the user to find the tint that best reduces their visual stress while reading. The prototype has already won a national engineering award. And it has caught the attention of the NHS. Millie is 11 years old.

From a classroom sketch to a working prototype

The story begins with a question. Each year, the UK-wide STEM initiative Primary Engineer poses the same challenge to students aged 3 to 19: “If you were an engineer, what would you do?” Every entry is assessed by professional engineers, and a handful of designs are selected to be built into real, working prototypes. Millie developed the idea while she was a pupil at Light Oaks Junior School, taking part in Primary Engineer – a national competition that challenges pupils to design creative solutions to real-world problems.Her entry was straightforward in its logic and radical in its ambition: glasses that could change colour, helping people with dyslexia find their personal sweet spot for reading comfort.  Millie was recognised as one of the winners at the Greater Manchester regional event in 2024 – one of 25 regional competitions held across the UK – and her idea was selected to be built into a prototype and revealed in July 2025.

The team tasked with making it real was from Thales UK, the defence and technology company based in Cheadle. What followed was seven months of intensive engineering work.

Seven months, five engineers, one 11-year-old’s vision

Sam Hassan, a graduate programme manager at Thales, said the team had “an amazing time” working on the project. “Over seven months we researched, planned, built and tested the design,” he explained, noting that the process included weekly meetings, input from researchers at the University of Georgia, STEM lessons delivered at Millie’s school, and a visit from Millie and her friends to see the finished prototype. After evaluating various options – including electrochromic and thermochromic lenses – the team settled on an LED-based solution. This approach allowed the lenses to change colour to red, green or blue, giving users the flexibility to choose the most suitable tint for their reading needs. The prototype was unveiled at the Greater Manchester Primary Engineer awards ceremony July 2025. When it was revealed, the team were thrilled by the reaction, and a member of the NHS was present, asking whether the project might progress further.

It was a remarkable moment for a concept that had started as a hand-drawn sketch submitted to a school competition. The story didn’t end at the regional ceremony. Millie went on to win a Gold Award in the Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal, the sister award to the MacRobert Award, the UK’s most prestigious engineering prize. Millie’s words carry their quiet power. “My dyslexia has always made reading a challenge, so I wanted to invent something that could make it easier. Seeing the engineers turn my idea into real glasses has been incredible. The thought that they might one day help other people with dyslexia is something I’m really proud of.” She also told: “I used to find reading scary. Now I feel like I can help other people who feel the same way.”

The science behind the colours

Colour-tinted lenses and overlays have been used informally in classrooms for years, but the scientific picture is complicated. Many people with dyslexia report experiencing what is sometimes called “visual stress”, a phenomenon in which text appears to move, flicker or blur on the page, making sustained reading uncomfortable or exhausting. Coloured filters have long been proposed as a way to alleviate these symptoms. Around 375,000 children only in the UK have dyslexia, and the use of coloured overlays and lenses is already common in educational settings. However, experts caution that the evidence base remains contested. While dyslexia is often associated with subjective experiences of visual distortions that create discomfort during reading, most researchers now consider dyslexia primarily a verbal rather than a visual disorder, and argue that reading difficulties are best addressed through interventions targeting phonological language skills and letter knowledge. This doesn’t necessarily undermine what Millie has built: Rainbow Glasses aren’t marketed as a cure, and Millie has never claimed otherwise. They are a tool – one that may reduce visual discomfort for some users, making it marginally easier to stay on the page long enough for other interventions and techniques to do their work. Individual responses to coloured lenses vary considerably, which is precisely why Rainbow Glasses are adjustable: the user chooses the tint that helps them, rather than being prescribed a fixed solution.

The NHS’s (National Health System) informal interest at the July 2025 unveiling suggests that, whatever the broader scientific debate, practitioners in the field see potential worth exploring.

Why this story matters beyond the invention

Dyslexia is estimated to affect around 10% of the UK population, with approximately 4% experiencing it severely. According to the European Dyslexia Association, between 5% and 12% of Europe’s population lives with dyslexia or a specific learning difference. It means millions of children and adults face daily challenges with reading, writing and processing text, often with significant effects on educational attainment, workplace confidence and self-esteem. The tools available to support them have improved steadily -structured literacy programmes, text-to-speech software, accessible fonts – but accessible, wearable technology that addresses the reading experience in real time remains limited. Rainbow Glasses, however early-stage, points toward a direction that deserves attention.

There is also something important in the story of how the glasses came to exist. Millie didn’t wait for a lab or a corporation to solve her problem. She answered a question – “if you were an engineer, what would you do?” – with the honesty and directness of someone who actually lives the problem every day. That, paired with the engineering expertise of the Thales team and the infrastructure of Primary Engineer to connect the two, is exactly the kind of pipeline that turns classroom ideas into prototypes – which is exactly what you can see and experience at Maker Faire Rome, year after year.

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– Nessy — *Dyslexia and Coloured Overlays*: https://www.nessy.com/en-gb/dyslexia-explained/understanding-dyslexia/dyslexia-and-vision

– BMJ / Medical News Today — *UK dyslexia charities should present a more balanced view about expensive lenses*: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/28