The Critics Are Right: Most EdTech Is Useless

18 February 2026By Dr Marisa French

"Is education technology mostly useless?" asks The Economist. "Kids Spend Hours in School on Screens. And for What?" echoes Bloomberg.

Ouch.

But here's the thing: we actually agree with most of it. Yes, we're an edtech company. Yes, we're saying this.

The Bloomberg piece drops a wild number: US schools spent $30 billion on education technology in 2024. That's ten times what they spent on textbooks! And where did all that money go? Mostly tablets, laptops, learning management systems, and apps that promised "engagement" but delivered... well, kids staring at screens.

The Real Problem: Passive Screen Time

The critics aren't wrong. They're just not specific enough. The problem isn't technology in education. The problem is passive technology in education.

Think about what most "edtech" actually looks like in practice. Students watching videos. Clicking through multiple-choice quizzes. Scrolling through digital textbooks. It's basically television with a progress bar. The screen does all the work. The student is just... there.

The OECD's Digital Education Outlook 2026 spells this out really clearly. When you just hand students general-purpose AI tools, learning often goes down because students outsource their thinking to the machine. But AI designed with "intentional pedagogical purpose" actually works. The difference isn't the technology itself. It's whether the technology makes students think or lets them coast.

CoSN's 2026 Driving K-12 Innovation Report is even blunter: "without a human-centered strategy, even the best technology will fail." Schools bought the tech. They didn't buy the strategy.

Active Learning Actually Works (Who Knew?)

There's decades of research on active learning, which is the revolutionary idea that students learn better when they do things rather than watch things. Shocking, I know! The question has always been: how do you scale it?

Physical science labs have always been active learning. You don't watch a titration. You perform one! You don't read about pendulum motion. You measure it. The learning happens through doing, through trial and error, through getting your hands on equipment and figuring things out.

The problem? Physical labs are expensive. They're dangerous. They're time-limited. And good luck staffing them when there's a massive STEM teacher shortage. Something had to give.

This is where most edtech completely dropped the ball. They replaced active physical labs with passive digital alternatives: animations of experiments, videos of scientists, clickable diagrams with labels. Students watch someone else do science instead of doing it themselves. It's cheaper, it's safer, and according to all the research... it basically doesn't work.

What If Virtual Labs Made You Actually DO Science?

This is the bit where I get to talk about WhimsyLabs. (Sorry not sorry, it's my blog!)

We kept the active part. In our virtual labs, students don't click a button that says "add chemical." They physically pour liquids. They don't select "heat beaker" from a menu. They position equipment over a Bunsen burner and control the flame themselves. They don't read about pipette technique. They develop the muscle memory by actually pipetting, badly at first, then better with practice.

This isn't just philosophy. It's backed by motor learning research. When you perform a physical action, your brain encodes it differently than when you watch someone else do it. The neural pathways are different. The retention is different. The transfer to real-world skills is different.

Our sandbox mode takes this even further. Students aren't following recipes. They're designing experiments! Given a problem like "determine the concentration of this unknown acid," they have to choose their own equipment, plan their own procedures, execute the techniques, analyse results, and figure out what went wrong when (not if) things don't work first time. That's what real scientists do. And you simply cannot do that passively.

AI That Watches What You DO (Not Just What You Write)

Here's where the whole "students using ChatGPT to cheat" panic becomes relevant. Yes, students can use AI to write essays. They can use it to solve maths problems. They can generate lab reports. Traditional assessment is in trouble.

But here's something ChatGPT absolutely cannot do: pour a liquid steadily.

Our AI tutor, WhimsyCat, watches how students work, not just what answers they write down. Did they hold the pipette at the right angle? Did they titrate too fast? Did they forget to rinse the burette? Did they check the meniscus at eye level? These are physical actions captured in real time. You can't outsource them to a text generator because they're not text. They're motion, timing, spatial reasoning, procedural knowledge you can only demonstrate by doing.

Pearson's assessment research calls practical skills AI-resistant. Not because we're trying to block AI, but because the skills themselves require physical demonstration. You can't fake titration technique with a language model. You have to actually do it.

WhimsyCat grades students on their process: experimental design, technique, troubleshooting, safety awareness. Every assessment generates an audit trail that teachers can review. This isn't AI replacing teacher judgement. It's AI providing evidence so teachers can make better judgements.

Supporting Teachers, Not Replacing Them

The CoSN report keeps emphasising "human-centered strategy" and we take that seriously. WhimsyLabs isn't designed to replace science teachers. It's designed to make their already-impossible job slightly more possible.

A single science teacher with 30 students cannot possibly observe every student's technique during a lab session. There aren't enough eyes. There isn't enough time. So practical assessment becomes a checkbox exercise: did they get the right answer? Did they write something in the observation column?

WhimsyCat provides continuous formative feedback while students work. Coaching technique, catching errors, asking questions. This doesn't replace the teacher! It multiplies them. The teacher can focus on students who need human attention while WhimsyCat handles routine guidance.

And teachers stay in control. They can create custom experiments. They can adjust difficulty. They can review AI grading and override it. The human is at the centre. The AI helps around the edges.

Questions We Wish the Critics Would Ask

We'd love to see edtech criticism get more precise. Instead of "is edtech useless?" try these:

  • Does this technology require active engagement? If students can use it while half-asleep, it's probably passive.
  • Does it track process or just outcomes? Multiple-choice quizzes only capture final answers. They miss everything interesting.
  • Does it support teachers or try to replace them? Teacher replacement has failed repeatedly. Teacher support has potential.
  • Is there evidence of learning transfer? Do students perform better in real-world contexts afterwards?
  • Was it designed with pedagogy in mind? Or by engineers who assumed learning would magically happen?

Most of that $30 billion fails these tests. Tablets handed out with no plan fail these tests. Learning management systems that become PDF graveyards fail these tests. AI chatbots deployed without any teaching strategy fail these tests.

Virtual labs where students physically perform experiments, get real-time technique feedback, and demonstrate skills that AI can't fake? That's a different thing entirely.

But Does It Actually Work?

We're not asking you to take our word for it. At BETT 2025, students themselves voted for us in the Kids' Choice Awards. At BETT 2026, Tech & Learning named us Best of BETT. These aren't marketing awards. They're recognition from educators and students who actually used the product.

We're running ongoing research with partner schools measuring practical skill transfer. Early results show that students who practice in WhimsyLabs demonstrate better technique in physical labs afterwards. The virtual practice actually transfers to real-world performance! The sandbox approach develops experimental thinking that cookbook labs never could.

The critics are right: most edtech is useless. We're trying really hard not to be most edtech.

The Bottom Line

The debate shouldn't be "technology versus no technology." That ship has sailed. The debate should be about what kind of technology, designed with what principles, implemented how.

Passive screen time dressed up as learning? Useless. AI that does students' thinking for them? Counterproductive. "We'll replace teachers with computers!" fantasies? Failed.

Active learning environments that require genuine engagement? That track process and technique? That support teachers instead of replacing them? That make practical science accessible to schools that can't afford (or staff) real labs? That develop skills AI can't fake?

That's the technology worth investing in. We're just trying to be a small part of it.

Related Articles

References

All Posts