My kids who are now teens had ipod touches practically from birth (we got the first versions of the Ipad, raspberry pi etc). They looked so clever to non-technical people fluidly swiping puzzle pieces around on a screen in a UI language most adults at the time barely understood. Then one day I put a wooden puzzle in front of them and realised their touch puzzle apps lacked several degree of freedom available in the physical world and they didn’t know how to rotate. The physical world is so much richer in many ways and skills learned in it are often more widely applicable.

It isn’t that technology isn’t valuable and can provide a benefit. It isn’t automatically superior or more complete and some people fetishize it to a ridiculous extent. For decades kids spent a huge amount of time cutting and pasting content into powerpoint in primary schools here at the expense of illustrating, reading and hand writing because companies like Microsoft were engaged in a war for mind share. Most technical people like myself thought this was a very poor use of technology but less technical people probably thought we were luddites. I have seen my kids do animation and story telling with apps that I think is quite a good use of technology but I wouldn’t deny them the experience of doing art with physical materials which I think in most ways is more foundational.