What is a screen-free toy?

The line is the eyes, not the electronics

It is easy to hear "screen-free" and picture a wooden block. But a set of walkie-talkies is screen-free, and so is a record player, and so is a toy that tells a story out loud. What they share is not the absence of a chip. It is that a child playing with one is looking at the room.

That matters because the things parents actually worry about — the stillness, the stopping, the difficulty of getting a child off it — come from the display and the design behind it, not from the silicon.

What it changes in practice

A screen-free game has to be played somewhere. There has to be floor, or a garden, or the back of a car. Children end up standing up, turning round, running to the other end of the hall, and talking to whoever else is there, because the game cannot be played by a thumb.

It also ends. A story finishes and a round is over. There is no next episode queued up behind it, which is why the end of a screen-free game is usually a smaller argument than the end of a screen one.

Where a smart toy sits

A smart toy with no screen is the awkward middle: it has sensors, sound and software, and it uses all three to run a game that happens in the room. Storyball is one of these. It knows how it was thrown, shaken, spun or tapped, and it answers with sound, a light and a buzz.

The phone is not out of the picture — a grown-up uses the app to set it up and to load new stories onto it. But the app is not the game. Once a story is playing, the phone can go back in a pocket.