Most EdTech companies want to maximise the time children spend on their platform. We deliberately built XTables Champions to do the opposite, and right now, that feels more relevant than ever.
I've been following the growing backlash against passive digital consumption in schools closely over the past few months. The EdSurge K-12 EdTech 2026 Trends Report puts it plainly: districts and parents are in the middle of a serious reckoning about screen time, partly driven by the wider cultural conversation sparked by Jonathan Haidt's *The Anxious Generation*. The question schools are asking is no longer simply "does this app engage children?" It's become "does this app actually teach anything, and at what cost to a child's attention and wellbeing?"
That shift matters enormously. And I think it's overdue.
The Problem With Engagement as a Success Metric
For years, EdTech was evaluated almost entirely on one thing: engagement. How long did children spend on the platform? How many sessions per week? How many badges did they earn?
The trouble is that engagement and learning are not the same thing. A child can spend 40 minutes earning virtual coins, levelling up a cartoon avatar, and unlocking "bonus worlds" without retaining a single maths fact. The platform feels productive. The dashboard looks impressive. But the actual return on instruction, to use the phrase I keep seeing in discussions about 2026 EdTech evaluation criteria, is close to zero.
When I looked into this more carefully, what struck me was how many of the dominant maths apps for primary-age children are structurally designed to keep children on-screen. Virtual currencies, digital pets, unlock mechanics, these are borrowed directly from the gaming industry. They are very good at generating sessions. They are not especially good at generating learning.
The most honest question any EdTech platform should answer is: what happens when a child succeeds? Does the product reward them by keeping them inside the product, or does it reward them by giving them something real?
What "Real-World Rewards" Actually Means
At XTables Champions, parents set the rewards themselves. Not us. Not an algorithm. A parent might tell their child: "When you complete this challenge, we'll bake those cookies you've been asking about" or "Hit your target this week and we're going to the park on Saturday." The reward lives entirely outside the screen.
This is not a small design detail. It is the whole philosophy.
What it means in practice is that XTables Champions has a natural exit point built in. A child works through their times tables challenge, they succeed, they close the app, and they go and do the real thing they were working towards. The screen time is purposeful and bounded. It ends with something tangible in the physical world, not a prompt to start the next level.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"We wanted parents to feel like the app worked when their child came running to them excited, not when the child was still staring at the screen an hour later."*
From the early conversations we are having with parents and schools, this resonates strongly. What we keep hearing is a kind of quiet frustration: parents who downloaded a maths app in good faith and then found themselves fighting to get their child off it at bedtime, with no clear sense of what the child had actually learned. That is the opposite of what a healthy relationship with educational technology should look like.
Why Schools Are Asking Different Questions in 2026
The EdSurge report reflects something I am genuinely seeing in how EdTech is being discussed right now. School leaders and curriculum leads are applying a much more rigorous lens to what is on their approved tools lists. Pedagogical value over passive consumption is not just a nice phrase, it is becoming a practical filter.
Several US districts are already moving towards stricter screen-time policies for the 2026-2027 school year. In the UK, conversations in primary education about the quality of digital learning, rather than just the quantity, are similarly picking up pace. The appetite for tools that are genuinely instructionally sound, and that respect the broader context of a child's day, is real.
For a brand-new company like ours, this moment is clarifying. We are not trying to retrofit a screen-time-friendly message onto a platform that was built to maximise sessions. The real-world rewards model was there from the start, because we thought it was simply the right way to do it.
Maths Practice That Respects Children's Time
I want to be clear about what XTables Champions is: it is a focused times tables practice platform for primary-age children. It is not trying to be everything. It does not have a sprawling universe of mini-games or a virtual economy designed to keep children inside it.
Children come in, practise their multiplication facts, work towards a goal they and their parent have set together, and then they leave. The learning is direct. The reward is real. The session ends.
That simplicity is a feature, not a limitation. In a moment when parents are actively searching for maths apps that do not come loaded with virtual currencies, and when schools are asking serious questions about return on instruction, a platform that knows exactly what it is for, and builds its rewards structure around the real world rather than the digital one, is genuinely different.
What I find encouraging is that the wider conversation is finally catching up to something we believed from the beginning: that the best thing an EdTech platform can do is teach the thing it is supposed to teach, and then get out of the way.
Find Out More About XTables Champions
If you are a parent who is rethinking which maths apps you have on your child's device, or a teacher or school leader looking for times tables practice tools that pass a tougher pedagogical test, I would genuinely love to hear from you.
XTables Champions is still in its early stages as a company, and the conversations we are having with parents and schools right now are shaping how we grow. Head over to xtableschampions.com to find out more about how the platform works, and get in touch if you want to talk about whether it could be the right fit for your child or your classroom.