MP Questions TT Rockstars Screen Time as Firm Plans Curfews
A Labour MP has told MPs that a popular times-tables game rewards primary pupils for how long they stay online, not for how well they use it. The company behind TT Rockstars says it will switch on curfews and daily limits for every school from 24 November.
The MP's concern
Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, raised the app on Tuesday at the Commons Science Committee. The committee is investigating how screen time and digital devices affect children's brain development.
TT Rockstars lets children compete with classmates for virtual coins and rock-star characters and outfits. Schools widely use it for maths homework.
Darlington said the app and others like it could harm development because they reward "length of time rather than quality of time spent online". She told BBC News that gamification can send children online for hours to earn the latest outfit.
Parents, she added, worry about rows over time on devices and about pressure to beat classmates. That could put children off activities away from screens.
The minister's line
Paul Waugh, the early years education minister, told the same committee that gamification is not the way to learn. He said the arguments EdTech firms give for it are really about driving screen use and profit.
Waugh said learning can be made fun without competing against yourself or someone else. In his view EdTech should support teachers, not replace them.
The government is drawing up guidelines for schools and parents on how much time five to 16-year-olds should spend on screens.
What the company says
Bruno Reddy, a former maths teacher and founder of the firm behind the app, said he shares concerns about screen time. The firm, Maths Circle, says TT Rockstars and Numbots, a similar programme for addition and subtraction, are used in 17,000 schools and more than 100,000 households.
The rule of thumb the company gives schools is three minutes, four or five times a week. Reddy said a typical child in September played on three days, for about six minutes each time.
From 24 November, he said, all schools will get a curfew and a daily limit, and leaderboards will start switched off.
Reddy also said the company has steered away from streaks, random rewards, chat messages, loot boxes and notifications. There is no advertising, and schools pay the same subscription however much their pupils play.
Calls to limit EdTech in class
The row comes amid growing calls to limit EdTech in classrooms. Charlotte Ashton, co-founder of the smartphone-free schools campaign Generation Focus, said there is "very little evidence they actually improve learning" for most digital learning tools.
She said not all technology is bad. Her group backs schools sticking to proven teaching methods until new tools are shown to help without harm.
Our view
The two sides describe very different pictures: hours spent chasing outfits on one side, about six minutes a session on the other. Nothing in the story settles it. The government's screen-time guidance, and what the Science Committee concludes, will show whether defaults such as curfews and limits satisfy critics or whether ministers want to go further.
Source: BBC News