Your child has been on the tablet for thirty minutes with an app that says it teaches English. Was that study, or was that screen time with a good excuse?

It is a fair question and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the app, and the difference is visible if you know what to look for.

The thing that makes a game teach

Games hold attention. That part is easy, and it is what most educational apps are good at. Points, streaks, colours, sounds.

Attention is necessary but it is not learning. A child can be completely absorbed for thirty minutes and finish knowing nothing new, if what they were absorbed in never asked them to retrieve anything.

The question to ask is simple: was the child made to produce answers, or shown things? A game where you tap through explanations and collect rewards is entertainment. A game where you must supply the word before moving on is practice.

Four things worth checking

Does it ask before it tells? Watch over their shoulder for two minutes. If the app shows a word and then asks about it immediately, it is testing short-term memory, which is nearly worthless. If it asks about words from days ago, it is doing the real thing.

Do wrong answers change what comes next? This is the biggest divider. In a weak app, getting something wrong costs a life or a point and the game moves on; the same word may not return for weeks, or ever. In a good one, a wrong answer means that word comes back soon and repeatedly.

Are the words the right words? An app teaching vocabulary unrelated to your child's curriculum is teaching English, just not the English they are tested on. For a child in a Turkish school there is an enormous difference between generic word lists and words aligned with what their class is doing.

Does the difficulty follow the child? If every child sees the same sequence regardless of what they know, it is a book with animations.

The reward problem

Points and streaks are not automatically bad. They solve a real problem: getting a child to come back on a Tuesday when they do not feel like it.

They go wrong when they become the point. Signs to watch for: your child can tell you their streak and their level but not a single word they learned today; they rush through answers to get to the reward screen; they are upset about losing a streak rather than about getting words wrong.

If the reward and the learning have separated like that, the game has stopped working regardless of the time spent.

A fair way to judge it

Do not measure by minutes. Measure by whether anything transfers.

Every couple of weeks, ask about five or six words from the app, away from the screen, in a normal conversation. If your child produces them, the app is doing its job and the thirty minutes were study. If the words only exist inside the app, they were entertainment.

That test costs nothing and settles the question better than any review or app-store rating.

For what it is worth, this is the standard we hold ourselves to. GetSpeakin's games exist to get children practising; the part that decides whether it works is underneath, in whether the next question is the one that child actually needs.

Try it with your class. GetSpeakin reads every answer and puts the words a child actually needs in front of them. Book a demo for your school.