Why we stopped doing homework on the iPad

We had one of those maths apps for about a year. You know the sort. Bright, cheerful, full of badges and a little cartoon fox that did a dance every time Felix tapped the right answer. He loved it. He'd happily sit there for twenty minutes, tapping away, and the app would tell us he was "on track" and "mastering" his seven times table.

Then parents' evening happened. His teacher, very kindly, said he was guessing. Not always, but often. He'd learned that if you tap enough options quickly, you get there in the end, and the fox still dances.

That was the moment the iPad went back in the drawer for homework.

The problem wasn't the app, exactly

I want to be fair. The app wasn't badly made. The problem is what a screen does to a seven-year-old doing maths. There's a constant, gentle pressure to keep tapping. Speed feels like the point. And when you can try four options and the wrong ones just shake and reset, you never actually sit with a problem. You never get that slightly uncomfortable pause where you have to think.

Pen and paper is slower. That's the whole point. When Felix writes out 7 x 8 and has to commit to an answer in biro, there's no take-backs and no dancing fox. He has to decide. And deciding is the bit that sticks.

What we do now

It's not very revolutionary. Most nights he gets a sheet. Six or seven questions, maybe a short bit of reading, the odd spelling. Twenty to thirty minutes, tops. He does it at the kitchen table while I'm cooking, which means I'm nearby but not hovering.

The change I didn't expect was in me, not him. When I marked his answers myself, I could see exactly where he went wrong. Not "he got 60 percent", but "he can do column addition fine until there's a carry over a zero, and then it falls apart". That's a thing I can actually help with. The app never told me that. It just told me a number.

Screens still have a place

I'm not anti-screen. He reads on a Kindle, he watches things, he plays games at the weekend, and that's all fine. For homework, though, the maths is better on paper and I'll happily argue the point. The only screen involved now is me typing his answers in afterwards so I can keep track of where he's strong and where he's wobbling.

That's basically why I ended up building BoffinBox. I wanted the worksheet to print, the kid to do it on paper, and the tracking to happen quietly in the background where it belongs, instead of in his face with a fox.

If you've got a maths app doing the dancing-fox thing, try one week of paper instead. Mark it yourself. You'll learn more about your child's maths in seven nights than the app told you in a year.