My point is by dismissing "screen time" wholesale, we create an environment where those types of /quote educational game /unquote are the only option. When people who are serious about education won't take apps/games seriously, they leave a vacuum filled by at best the pure sugar empty calories, and at worst by microtransaction scams. Any app that has a call to action in it gets deleted from the iPad my kids use. It's like saying all movies are trash because the most popular movies are trash.
And this is reflected by the current state of educational games - I know there are good ones because I've seen my kids learn with them, and I believe there could be MORE good ones, but the people who have the empathy and experience to make good ones have already thrown away the proverbial baby with the proverbial bath water
I have seen some that get like a special day at school. There was something they did with Scratch, for instance.
I've thought that part of the reason that all the studies are showing that computers don't seem to help with education are just showing that computers as they are currently used don't help with education. A key element of ... but on a computer! is that if you just take something from the physical world and put it on a computer, you end up with the disadvantages of both compounding. To successfully put something on a computer, you need to work out a way to harness the unique advantages a computer can give you to make up for the inevitable disadvantages it brings. Simply randomizing numbers for addition & multiplication isn't really it.
What's amazing to me is that this is still being discussed, even though a solution to the problem was found decades ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book)
I think that you might find Papert's ideas interesting; he based a lot of them on the foundations laid by Piaget:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
From what I remember all of the "educational computer games" I played in the early 1990s were more or less this.
There have been some better ones though, over the years. Say Lemmings or World of Goo.
The best is probably something like Logo or Scratch, with some help/guidance from an adult.
What kids play in school though these days (does that make me sound old?) are things like Prodigy (prodigygame.com), featuring decent graphics but mind-numbing content, with constant nags to upgrade to a premium account.
Based on my own experiences and internal states, I would still observe that "screen time" tends to have problems at a very low sensory level, in that even when you're doing something educational, you still have the problem that relatively tiny inputs tend to produce outsized sensory effects compared to what the rest of the world yields. I have to admit I cringe a tiny bit when my kids are playing their mandatory educational games and they correctly add two numbers together, and they get a loud chicken squawk and an animation. That's not how the real world works, you do not get loud sounds and animations simply for adding two numbers together. Even if your forebrain is getting trained in something useful like numbers, you can still be feeding dubious input to the lower-level brain systems.
But, that said, screens are a part of the modern world and they must be learned to be dealt with, and it's still better to have something interactive and productive be the bulk of the time than mere flashy empty calories. I'd even distinguish between good video that you engage with, think about, try to guess what's next, think about what makes it work, and video where it's merely flashy-flash bang-boom entertainment. There's a time and a place for the latter; we all need R&R, but it's not large.
There is a way to recover some value even from the over-stimulative nature of the media, which is that as they grow up, they're going to be under attack by advertisers and journalists (but I repeat myself) who abuse overstimulation as much as they possibly can to convince you to do something that costs you but benefits them by overloading your brain, basically. Some training and practice in resisting such things is helpful.