And why I believe we need to rebuild the skills speed leaves behind

By Bruce Jackson

Bruce Jackson is the inventor of KaiBot and CTO and co-founder of Kai’s Education. He champions a UDL approach to coding that combines hands-on learning, accessibility, and real-world problem-solving so more students can build confidence in STEM.

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Everything is faster now. Faster information. Faster entertainment. Faster decisions. Faster dopamine, if we’re being honest.

I don’t think that’s automatically bad. But I do think it’s changing how kids learn.

And as someone who has spent years building educational tools for children, especially tools designed to make learning more inclusive, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable thought:

We are asking students to develop deep-thinking skills in an environment designed for shallow speed.

That’s the tension.

I call it the ten-second economy.

It’s a World where almost anything can be found, answered, summarised, or replaced in seconds. Kids are growing up fluent in this rhythm. They didn’t invent it. They adapted to it. Fast.

That’s what kids do best.

But school, and learning more broadly, still asks for something very different. It asks students to sustain attention. To tolerate uncertainty. To solve problems before they know the answer. To collaborate through friction. To debug mistakes without falling apart.

Those are slower skills. Heavier skills. The kind you build through repetition, struggle, and feedback.

And that’s exactly where I think the gap is growing.

This is not a “screens are bad” argument

Let me get this out of the way early.

I’m not interested in the lazy argument that technology is ruining children.

That’s too simplistic. And honestly, it lets us off the hook.

Technology is extraordinary. It opens doors. It gives students access to information, creativity, communication, translation, and tools that previous generations never had. I work in edtech. I believe in technology.

But I also believe tools shape habits.

And many of today’s tools are designed to reduce friction.

That’s brilliant in some parts of life. Nobody wants more friction when paying a bill, finding a location, or getting help quickly. But when friction disappears from everything, students get fewer chances to practise the exact skills that learning depends on.

Attention.
Memory retrieval.
Patience.
Error correction.
Collaboration.
Self-awareness.

Modern digital life is incredibly good at helping us get to the answer.

It is not always as good at helping us build the thinking that gets us there.

That’s a design problem, not a moral one.

Kids are adapting exactly as they’ve been trained to

Children are not broken.

They are adapting to the world we have built around them.

If information is always available in one tap, they will rely on retrieval less.
If the next step is constantly suggested, they will do less planning.
If answers arrive instantly, they will spend less time sitting with not knowing.

And yet “not knowing” is where a huge amount of learning begins.

That awkward pause.
That first wrong attempt.
That moment when the brain has to hold uncertainty long enough to work something out.

That’s not failure. That’s the workout.

I often think of learning like a gym.

You do not build strength by watching someone else lift weights. You build it by lifting something a little too heavy, wobbling through it, failing a bit, and trying again.

The same is true for thinking.

If every hard moment is removed too quickly, we shouldn’t be surprised when students struggle with the mental equivalent of heavy lifting.

Attention is now one of the most valuable things in a classroom

There’s another issue hiding in plain sight: attention has become fragile.

Not because kids are lazy.
Not because teachers are doing anything wrong.
But because students are trying to learn inside a world that constantly competes for their focus.

A phone on a desk.
A notification.
A tab open in the background.
A quick urge to check one thing.

It all adds up.

Learning takes mental bandwidth. Comprehension, reasoning, memory, and problem-solving all rely on it. But distraction is expensive. Even when we are not actively using a device, part of the brain is often still monitoring it, resisting it, or anticipating it.

It’s like trying to read a book while someone keeps lightly tapping you on the shoulder.

Eventually, your brain gets tired of pretending that doesn’t matter.

That’s why I don’t think the question is, “Why can’t kids focus anymore?”

The better question is, “What kind of environment are we asking them to focus inside?”

We are rewarding speed, then wondering why depth feels harder

There is a wider cultural shift happening too.

So much of modern content is short, fast, and chunked. Students are reading more, in one sense, but a lot of that reading is built around snippets, summaries, captions, short passages, quick prompts, and endless skimming.

Again, that’s not evil. It’s useful in many contexts.

But deep reading is different.

Deep reading asks you to stay.
To reread.
To connect ideas.
To slow down enough for meaning to sink in.

Screens are often optimised for switching. Deep reading is the opposite of switching.

So we end up with students who are highly capable of navigating information, but who often get fewer opportunities to sit with it long enough to really interrogate it.

That has consequences.

Because life after school will not just reward quick retrieval. It will reward judgment, creativity, resilience, collaboration, and the ability to stay with hard problems long after the easy answers run out.

The real risk is not technology — it’s neglected skill-building

What worries me most is not that children are growing up with powerful tools.

It’s that some of the most important human skills are getting fewer reps.

The ten-second economy is not destroying learning.
It is quietly starving certain muscle groups.

The ability to sustain attention.
The ability to think before reacting.
The ability to work through confusion .
The ability to explain an idea to someone else.
The ability to fail, adjust, and try again.

These are not flashy skills. They don’t come with a viral soundtrack. But they are the ones that matter when things get real.

When the code doesn’t work.
When the team disagrees.
When the instructions are incomplete.
When the answer is not obvious.
When the first attempt falls flat.

Those moments are not side quests in learning.

They are the main game.

So what do we do?

I don’t think the answer is banning technology.

That would be like trying to solve junk food by banning kitchens.

The answer is balance. Better design. More intentionality.

We need to rebuild the missing muscle groups by giving students more learning experiences that are:

hands-on,
social,
feedback-rich,
accessible,
and just difficult enough to require real thought.

In other words, we need learning that doesn’t just deliver answers. We need learning that builds thinkers.

That’s one of the reasons I care so deeply about screen-light, tangible learning experiences.

Because physical interaction changes the game.

When a student can see their thinking laid out in front of them, it becomes easier to reflect on it. Easier to explain it. Easier to debug it. The invisible becomes visible.

And once thinking becomes visible, students can do something powerful: they can improve it.

Why tangible learning matters more than ever

When children work with physical tools, abstract ideas become easier to grasp.

That matters more than many people realise.

A lot of learning breaks down because too much of the process is hidden. The steps are hidden. The logic is hidden. The mistake is hidden. The thinking sits trapped in the head where it can become muddled, frustrating, and hard to articulate.

Tangible learning changes that.

Now the sequence is on the table.
The pattern is visible.
The bug is visible.
The fix is visible.

Students are no longer just thinking. They are seeing their thinking.

And that opens the door to better conversations.

Because learning is not only cognitive. It is social.

When students solve problems together using physical tools, they talk. They explain. They negotiate. They test ideas aloud. They challenge each other. They co-debug.

That kind of structured collaboration is not fluff. It is one of the most powerful ways to deepen understanding.

Productive struggle is not something to avoid

This is where I think we need a mindset reset.

Some of the best learning moments do not look smooth.

They look awkward.
Messy.
Slow.
A bit frustrating.

A student tries something. It fails.
They look confused.
They check the sequence.
A classmate points something out.
They try again.
It works.

That little cycle is gold.

In the ten-second economy, friction feels like a flaw. If something takes too long, we assume the design is wrong. But in learning, the right kind of friction is often the point.

Students do not build resilience by getting everything right immediately.

They build it by discovering that being wrong is survivable. That confusion is temporary. That mistakes contain information. That success often comes after revision, not before it.

That is not just good for school.
That is good for life.

My view: we need to rebuild what speed is eroding

From where I stand, this is not about nostalgia.

It’s not about going backwards.
It’s not about replacing technology with worksheets and hoping for the best.

It’s about recognising that the future will belong to people who can do more than get fast answers.

AI can generate answers. Search can find facts. Automation can handle routine tasks.

What will matter more is what humans do next.

Can we question the answer?
Can we test it?
Can we apply it?
Can we work with others to build something better?
Can we persist when the solution is unclear?

Those are not old-world skills.

They are the new premium skills.

And I believe schools have a huge opportunity here.

Not to fight the ten-second economy.
But to counterbalance it.

To create environments where students practise the skills speed leaves behind.

Why this matters to me personally

This is personal for me because I know what it feels like to be excluded by the way learning is designed.

I know what it means when systems assume one way of learning, one way of accessing information, one pace, one path.

That’s part of why I care so much about inclusive educational design.

Because when we make learning tangible, accessible, collaborative, and feedback-rich, we don’t just support stronger outcomes. We open the door wider for more learners to participate with confidence and independence.

And that matters.

Because the future should not belong only to the students who happen to thrive in low-friction, screen-saturated environments.

It should belong to all learners.

Final thought

A world that can answer almost anything in ten seconds is remarkable.

But if children grow up thinking every meaningful problem should also be solved in ten seconds, we are setting them up badly.

Not because they are incapable.
Because we are overtraining speed and undertraining depth.

So no, I don’t believe we need less technology in education.

I believe we need better-designed learning around it.

More moments where students think before they tap.
Build before they search.
Collaborate before they copy.
Debug before they quit.

Deep thinking is a stamina skill.

And stamina skills need reps.