There once was a time when children would play at breaktime. They would be a constant blur of motion, pushing out exhausted breaths of air, muscles screaming for mercy. Nowadays, the internet has dulled their sense of play, and they all just sit around in the playground, incapable of physical exertion.

Such a dystopian scene may indulge in some hyperbole, but the perception that children play less due to the technological revolution is certainly prevalent. Whether it is accurate, though, is another matter.

It’s a difficult claim to stand up with evidence: the data around the impact of technology on teen lifestyles is, according to some in the field, a mess. Pulling out causation from correlation is tricky, and those who are trying to unpick it say tech is likely much less to blame than we presume.

But could tech also be used to get children to play more outside, specifically in schools? It seems unlikely, but it does reflect a possible future reality.

Mutlu Cukurova from UCL Institute of Education is co-investigator on a project called Playing Out with IoT (internet of things). He and his colleagues are seeking to find out how the IoT - in which everyday items become connected via the web (turning your oven on via your smartphone, for example, or your fridge auto-ordering replacement groceries) - could help increase the physical activity of children at breaktimes by offering novel or interesting ways to play. They have come up with some interesting inventions.

Tech it outside

One idea the team has developed is using BBC Micro:bit computers to create simple “smartwatches” that children wear to play tag. By using Bluetooth sensors and lights that flash when the devices are touched together, children will know for sure whether they have actually “tagged” one another.

This isn’t just designed to encourage children to play more (the novelty of the flashes could make the game more exciting), but also to remove some of the conflicts that occur during such games to help keep them playing.

“Analogue activities are harder to manage for children in that they are a lot more open ended and without rules,” says Cukurova. “With technology, though, you can define rules.”

He concedes that because the devices provide rules for the games, there are often more conflicts when they are transgressed. However, he argues that because the rules exist, the conflicts are usually solved amicably and the game continues, rather than children walking away and stopping playing, “which is a lot more frequent in traditional analogue play situations”, he says.

Another idea the team has developed is IoT-enabled “play poles” that have different colours on top and can be spaced out across a play area. One child is able to control and change the colour on the poles while the other children have to run to the different colours when instructed.

“You would have one child who was in charge of changing the colour of the lights and encouraging the children to run around and then afterwards they can change roles, so that everyone gets a chance to get involved in some form,” explains Cukurova.

What’s notable about this is that the poles could easily be set up in any configuration - either attached to physical infrastructure or placed out randomly whenever required, allowing schools to adopt such technologies to help motivate children to move more. It also means they can target certain muscles or activities - for example, climbing for arms and shoulders, or crawling for core strength.

The team is logging all these ideas on its website - playout.digital - and has made the code for the projects available on GitHub.

Of course, because these play interventions are digital, there are added benefits to them other than just the physical activity at the time. For example, they offer the ability to gather data on how children are playing to see how active they are, how often devices are interacting and spot potential concerns if, say, a usually active student suddenly stops playing.

That said, data collection of this kind may ring alarm bells for parents. Rose Luckin, who is part of the research project and a member of the Institute for Ethical AI in Education, stresses that this is a major consideration of the team.

“The potential for any IoT technology to enable the collection of data is huge and we have to be extraordinarily careful because we need to make sure people give genuinely informed consent for their data or child’s data, for all the purposes that the data is going to be used,” she says.

Schools are well used to dealing with working with sensitive data on children, so may not find this too daunting if they are the ones collecting and analysing it to create useful exercise-related insights - the latter is no doubt the harder challenge.

Jumping to conclusions

But there is another concern parents may raise, too: these digitally powered games may be interpreted as yet another technological advance that erodes a more traditional childhood. For example, even the most ardent believer in edtech may see the idea of an IoT skipping rope - two PlayStation Move devices waved around with someone standing in the middle “jumping” over an imaginary rope - a touch underwhelming. Is the tech really adding anything? Or, worse, could it be taking away essential elements of play such as imagination, conflict resolution and, well, actual ropes?

Cukurova stresses that the ideas the lab is working on are not meant to replace traditional forms of play but are about recognising the era that children are growing up in and finding ways to complement traditional play methods.

“I think it would be the wrong message to say that IoT tools should be the only way to engage children with play activities,” he says. “We would not want to miss out on the opportunity for allowing play for the sake of it, with no rules, just to play and do whatever you want to do.

“But because of the contextual factors and the digital era that we are living in, children are not really engaging with playing out activities as much as they should be. So we have a responsibility to try to bring in features through IoT to create physical activities, games and opportunities.”

The argument is essentially that children may play without these inventions, but they will definitely play with them. So, will we soon see play areas in schools full of digitally enabled play equipment and teachers tracking movement on a tablet computer while sipping coffee in the staffroom?

We’re not there yet, but we probably soon will be…

Dan Worth is deputy commissioning editor at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 28 February 2020 issue under the headline “How the internet broke breaktime”