Technology hasn’t replaced children’s experience, it’s given them another way to look at it - Dr Becky Parry

During Rotherham’s year as the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture in 2025, we gave thousands of children and young people opportunities to shape the programme and decide what they wanted to explore.

What surprised us was not how much they wanted to engage with technology, but how often they chose outdoor play, nature and the physical world. Children chose The World Beneath Our Feet as one of the themes they wanted to explore during our festival year, focusing on nature, sustainability and climate change. They chose outdoor games. They chose to investigate their local river. They wanted to play, run, make things and be outside.

They also chose Plug In and Play, celebrating their love of videogames and digital culture. The two weren't opposites - children saw no contradiction between them.

That matters because so much of the national debate about screen time starts from an assumption: that children are naturally drawn to screens and need adults to pull them away.

Our experience suggested something different: give children meaningful choices and opportunities, and they don't necessarily choose the screen, they choose what interests them. Sometimes that's a game of tig. Sometimes it's making a film about that game. Sometimes it's designing a videogame about cleaning up a river.

One of our projects involved children from seven primary schools in Rotherham filming the outdoor games they already played – including tug-of-war, tig and cops and robbers. Working with filmmaker Rachel Bunce, they learned about camera angles and storytelling while documenting their own play. The technology didn't replace the experience; it gave them another way to look at it.

One six-year-old became fascinated by a ladybird he found on an obstacle course, while another carefully captured that moment in close-up. Later, when the films were shown at a cinema, children were still identifying the camera techniques they had learned weeks earlier. They were active players, filmmakers and audiences.

Something similar happened when children worked with the National Videogame Museum to create Frog Tipping. Inspired by videogames, they designed a game about removing litter from the River Don – but then brought it into the physical world, using wooden rods, magnets and beanbags to fish rubbish from a pretend river. Again, the choice wasn't playing with technology or playing outdoors, it was both.

This is why I think our conversation about children and technology needs to move on.

There is an important distinction between consuming digital content and creating it. Endless scrolling can be passive. Making an animation, designing a game or filming a story requires imagination, collaboration, problem-solving and critical thinking. When children create media, they also start to understand how media is made.

In one animation project, children became so engaged that many continued creating films at home using free software they had discovered at school. They began asking questions: Who made this? How was it edited? Why does it look this way? What is it trying to tell me?

Those are precisely the questions we want young people to ask in a world shaped by algorithms, influencers and artificial intelligence.

Of course, children need protection online. Technology companies have big influence and big responsibilities. Parents, carers and schools have an important role in helping children develop healthy digital habits. But we should be careful about defining the problem simply as children spending too much time on screens.

Perhaps the more useful question is: what are children doing, making, thinking and experiencing – on screens and off them?

We don't worry about children reading books because they are consuming too many stories. We know this helps them to write stories too. We don't tell children to stop listening to music because they aren't making enough of it. We give them instruments and lessons. The same principle should apply to technology. Through playful learning with digital media children started on an important journey to develop critical awareness, enabling them to navigate content that seeks to persuade and influence them.

Children need opportunities to be creators, not just consumers – of digital content, certainly, but also of the physical and natural world around them. Rotherham's experience gave us a glimpse of what can happen when we give children new tools for thinking about technology.

Dr Becky Parry is the Creative Learning Manager for Rotherham Children’s Capital of Culture.