An hour with a computer can mean an endless feed. It can also mean building a game, predicting where a sprite will land, finding a collision bug, and showing someone else how the score works. The clock sees two hours of screen time. The child is doing very different work.
Watch the work
In a coding class, students make decisions that alter a system. If the player starts in the wrong corner, they inspect the x and y values. If winning and losing happen at once, they find the rules that are competing. The program follows the instructions it has, including the mistaken ones, and gives the student something definite to investigate.
That resistance matters. A video continues whether the viewer understands it or not. A game with broken movement does not. To fix it, the student has to compare intention with evidence and revise the rule.
Ask for a tour
After class, ask the student to open the project and show how it works. A small game, robot route, reaction timer, or state diagram is enough. Then ask a concrete question: What starts the program? Which number controls left and right? What went wrong today? What did you change?
A finished project does not prove that every line was written alone or that every idea is mastered. It does give the conversation an object. The student can point to a rule, run a test, and explain a choice instead of reporting that class was simply ‘good.’
Try one small change
Change the player speed, move a safe zone, or make the score begin at five. If the student can predict the result and find the relevant part of the program, the project has become something they can work on rather than something they merely operated.
Ask about a failure too. Real projects accumulate wrong turns: x changes instead of y, a loop runs forever, or restart keeps an old value. Describing the repair is often more revealing than showing the polished final run.
Boundaries still matter
Useful work at a computer does not make unlimited device use a good idea. A class needs a beginning, a task, checkpoints, and an ending. Students should talk to people, sketch on paper when it helps, take visual breaks, and save their work properly.
School of Code classes follow a planned sequence. Computer Lab time is for guided work on projects that already have a purpose. Neither is a licence for random gaming or browsing.
A better measure
Minutes are still worth counting, but they do not describe the whole activity. Ask whether the child made choices, encountered a real difficulty, inspected evidence, and left with a version that can be demonstrated. Those are visible differences between making and consuming.
A computer can be a television, but it can also be a workshop bench, notebook, stage, and test instrument. The useful question is which one it was today.