Active, unstructured engagement with the physical environment is absolutely necessary for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning is imp

Active, unstructured engagement with the physical environment is absolutely necessary for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning is important for "STEM-like" learning, and also for safely navigating the physical world. Children use fewer senses to engage with visual simulacra, and there is less diversity in the visual data provided by a screen than there is in a physical object. Consider that holding an object allows a child to explore what happens to (sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, temperature) of (the object, their own body) when they (eat it, throw it, change its angle re: sunlight, tear it apart, bang it with a rock, draw on it, draw on something with it, etc). A really excellent simulation might encode some of those behaviors. Most, especially "educational" things, do not. No simulations deal with texture, taste, smell, weight, or effects on the user's own body. This has been common knowledge in the developmental psych community for decades. Also obvious that "sweaty work", as exercise, is really quite beneficial to mental health and ability. This is also common knowledge in the psych/medical communities.