Sarah teaches visual arts at a primary school in Melbourne. She has been in the classroom for eleven years and describes herself as someone who loves colour but always struggled to explain it.

"Kids come in knowing red, yellow, and blue make everything," she says. "That is what they have been taught. And then you try to tell them about cyan and magenta and their faces just go blank."

She ordered a CMY Cube on a whim after seeing them on Instagram. She put them on a table near the window during a free exploration session and watched what happened.

"Within minutes, one of my students had figured out that when you overlap the cyan and magenta, you get blue. She was so excited she was practically yelling. And I thought, I have been trying to explain that for years and a cube just did it in four minutes."

Sarah now uses the her CMY Cube as a starting point for every colour theory unit. Students explore with the cubes first, then she introduces the vocabulary. Subtractive colour mixing, complementary colours, secondary hues. The concepts land differently when students have already discovered them with their hands.

"It is not me telling them how colour works," she says. "It is them figuring it out. I am just there to give it a name."

Bringing light into the design studio

At a secondary school in Brisbane, design teacher Marcus uses CMY Cubes with Year 10 and 11 students who are working toward their visual design folios.

For him, the cubes are less about discovery and more about depth. His students already understand basic colour theory. What they often struggle with is the difference between how colour behaves in print versus on screen, and why the same design can look completely different depending on the medium.

"CMYK is foundational to print design," Marcus explains. "But it is an abstract concept when you are just looking at a colour picker on a screen. When students can actually hold cyan, magenta, and yellow and see how they combine physically, it clicks in a completely different way."

He uses the cubes alongside software lessons, moving between the physical and the digital deliberately. Students will mix colours with the cubes, note what they observe, then try to replicate those combinations in their design software. The process builds an intuition for colour that Marcus says is hard to teach any other way.

"There is a particular student I think about. She is incredibly talented digitally but had this gap when it came to print. She just could not feel her way through CMYK the way she could with RGB on screen. We spent one session with the cubes and something just unlocked. Her print work since then has been completely different."

The unexpected benefit: slowing down

One theme that comes up again and again when teachers talk about CMY Cubes is not just what students learn, but how they engage while learning it.

Primary teacher and STEAM coordinator Priya, based in Sydney, noticed something she was not expecting when she introduced the cubes to her Year 3 and 4 students.

"They slowed down," she says simply.

Her students are used to fast digital feedback. Tap, swipe, instant result. The CMY Cube asks for something different. You have to hold it up. Angle it. Wait for the light. Move it again.

"It is tactile and it is slow, in the best way. I had students sitting quietly for twenty minutes just exploring. That almost never happens. And the conversations that came out of it were so much richer than what I usually get from a worksheet or a video."

Priya has since built a light and colour unit specifically around the cubes, which culminates in students creating their own colour observation journals. They document what they see, sketch the overlapping light pools, and write about what surprised them. The journals have become some of the most creative work she sees all year.

We asked the teachers we spoke with what they would say to another educator thinking about bringing CMY Cubes into their classroom.

The answers were consistent.

Do not over-plan it. Put the cubes out and let students explore before you say a single word. The discovery moment is the lesson.

Use natural light if you can. A sunny window transforms what the cubes can do. If your classroom faces south or does not get much direct light, a simple desk lamp works well too.

Do not limit it to science. The cubes belong just as much in art, design, and even English classrooms talking about symbolism and the language of colour. They are a starting point for curiosity, and curiosity does not live in just one subject.

And finally: order more than you think you need. Sharing is lovely in theory. In practice, every student wants one in their hands.

If you are a teacher using CMY Cubes in your classroom, we would love to hear from you. Tag us on Instagram at @cmycubes or send us a message. Your students' discoveries might just end up here.