Screen time that ends with something made

Most parents we talk to don’t hate screens. They hate the way some screen time ends: a tired kid, a fight about stopping, and nothing to show for the hour.

We think about that a lot, because Game Creators Club is a screen. Here’s how we try to make the time on it end differently.

A session ends with something made

Every lesson ends with Make: the child takes the idea they just learned and puts it into their own copy of the game. A gate that opens only when they’ve collected three berries. A spring tuned so Kip lands exactly on the cloud. It’s small, it’s theirs, and it’s still there tomorrow.

Ask them to show you. Kids are proud of the things they make, and a game is something they can hand you to play.

Nothing pulls them back in

Game Creators Club has no ads, and no one chats with strangers in it. It never sends a notification to a kid. There are no streaks to protect and no rewards that disappear if they skip a day. When your child puts the iPad down, nothing in the app tries to make them pick it back up.

You set how long they can play each day in GCC Parents, and the app keeps to it.

You can see what the time was for

Each week GCC Parents shows you a card: what your kid made and the coding ideas they used, in plain words. You don’t have to watch over their shoulder to know whether the hour went somewhere.

Some ideas that help at home

• Play it with them first. Ten minutes beside them on the first day shows them you care what they make.
• Ask about the rules, not the score. “What does the mushroom’s rule say?” is a better question than “Did you win?”
• Let them teach you. Explaining a rule out loud is how a child finds out whether they really understand it.
• End on a make, not a level. If time is nearly up, suggest they finish by changing something in their own game.

Screen time is a tool

An hour on a screen can be an hour of being entertained, or an hour of figuring something out. We built Game Creators Club to be the second kind, and we’d rather a kid played it for twenty good minutes than three restless hours.