There are amazing innovations being implemented into schools daily, but what are the downsides of this? As with Elliot Simmonds' piece on Friday, Shiny Things director Mat Peterson has some concerns about the expansion of edtech - namely, the lack of physical actions that these modernisations require.

While the use of devices in one-to-one classrooms is hugely beneficial to education, the potential impacts of abandoning handwriting in favour of keyboards have largely been overlooked. Early formative years are essential for sensorimotor development and a complete shift to computer-based teaching could be detrimental to a child’s learning.

New research from the Stanford University School of Medicine shows that areas of the human brain do become specialised for the specific recognition of numerals. Meanwhile, several studies have shown that the human brain's specialised ability to recognise letters and numbers is strengthened by sensorimotor experiences with those characters, specifically through handwriting practice.