Toy Story 5 Isn't About Screen Time. It's About Screen Value.

TL;DR: Toy Story 5's Lilypad isn't evil. She's patient and always available, and that's exactly why she unsettles us. The fear was never the device. It's what most screen time asks a kid to do: look down, alone. Which is why counting minutes is the wrong test. The better unit is screen value, not screen time, and the fastest read on it is one question: is the kid alone, or with other people? The look-up test gives schools five ways to tell the difference.

Toy Story 5 came out last weekend. I took my kids, bought the absurd souvenir popcorn bucket, and spent two hours quietly rooting for the cowboy to beat the tablet. Which is awkward, because I run an education technology company. The tablet is, loosely, my team. Pixar made the biggest family movie of the summer and cast a piece of edtech as the thing menacing the toys. If that doesn't make people in my industry uncomfortable, they're not paying attention. But I don't think Pixar made a movie against my industry. They made a movie about the one distinction my industry has spent twenty years avoiding, and they nailed it.

One thing before I start: the movie is set in a kid's bedroom, but I want to talk about the classroom, because that's where this fight has teeth. At home, you choose. You can sit on the couch and play the dumb frog game with your kid. At school, somebody else chose for your kid, in a purchasing meeting you'll never see, and you can't opt out of what the district picked. So this one is for schools. (The parent version is coming. People keep asking.) And I'm writing it from Utah, which just made itself the epicenter.

The scariest thing about Lilypad is that she's good at her job

The setup, if you've avoided the trailers: Bonnie, the kid who inherited Woody and the gang, gets a tablet named Lilypad. Greta Lee voices her. Shaped like a frog, endlessly patient, always available. The toys can't compete. Bonnie stops playing.

Notice what Pixar didn't do. Lilypad doesn't scheme. She isn't Lotso with a power cord. Director Andrew Stanton has said she isn't even a villain, just "the next phase in Bonnie's life." She wants to help Bonnie grow up. She's just built differently than a cowboy doll.

That choice is why this lands harder than a cartoon about an evil phone could. The things pulling our kids away from each other aren't malicious. They're helpful. That's what makes them hard to fight.

Every parent who felt a knot in their stomach in that theater felt something true. I'd know. I'm a high-functioning screen addict raising kids who could swipe before they could scribble. That knot is pattern recognition, not paranoia.

The villain was never the tablet. It was the word "alone."

Here's where I'm supposed to defend screens, and I won't, because the fear is real. It's just aimed slightly off-center. Watch what actually beats Lilypad: not a lecture about device limits, but shared play. A toy loses to a tablet one-on-one every time. Three kids on the floor arguing about whether the dinosaur is allowed on the spaceship beat any tablet in the room, because they were never there for the toys. They were there for each other.

Classrooms work the same way. A screen that isolates a kid loses to a room solving one problem together, even with a screen in the middle of it. The villain was never the tablet. It was the word alone.

Utah just wrote that into law, probably without meaning to. Our new classroom-technology statute, HB 273, defines the screen time worth worrying about as time a student spends on a device "when the use of the electronic device does not involve instruction, guidance, or interaction with a teacher." Read that again. The state's legal definition of bad screen time isn't a number of minutes. It's a kid alone with a screen.

Stop counting minutes. Start measuring screen value.

Most of the new laws miss that. Six states passed classroom screen-time laws this year; Iowa's caps screens at sixty minutes a day for K-5, full stop. A district could swap a brilliant collaborative science lesson for a kid silently tapping a worksheet app and come out more compliant, because the worksheet ran shorter. The stopwatch can't tell them apart. It was never built to.

Richard Culatta, who runs ISTE and who we've worked with in the past, has the sharpest fix for this I've heard. He argues the phrase "screen time" is itself the problem, because it treats every minute on a screen as identical. Thirty minutes lost in a mindless game and thirty minutes on a video call with grandma are not the same thirty minutes. So stop measuring screen time. Measure screen value.

The research backs him, though most people only half-quote it. Take reading. A 2018 meta-analysis of 54 studies and 171,000 readers (Delgado et al., Educational Research Review) found comprehension is reliably worse on a screen than on paper, and worst for the dense informational text school runs on. The gap hasn't shrunk for "digital natives." A separate analysis of nearly 470,000 students (Altamura et al., 2023, Review of Educational Research) found that in the early grades, reading for fun on a screen is, if anything, negatively associated with comprehension. If you're on the screens-are-poison side, that's your evidence, and it's good.

Now the part that camp leaves out. Screens are genuinely good at teaching a six-year-old to read in the first place. A 2020 meta-analysis of early-literacy software (Abrami et al.) found solid gains in phonics and phonemic awareness, the mechanical work of turning letters into sounds, while the same programs barely moved reading comprehension at all. Same medium, same kid, opposite verdict. A screen is one of the better tools for teaching a child to decode a word and one of the worse places to have her comprehend a chapter. Two sides of one coin, and almost everyone in this fight pockets the side that confirms what they already believed.

Even those decoding gains mostly need an adult in the loop. A 2020 review of the phonics game GraphoGame (McTigue et al.) found the software didn't beat ordinary teaching unless an adult was actively working alongside it.

If you only ask one question, ask this one

So here's the question I'd put on every school's wall, the one underneath the reframe and the law and the whole back half of this movie: is my kid alone?

It does the most work of any question in the building, and there's hard evidence for it. A 2018 review in the Review of Educational Research pooled 425 studies and found the same technology produces dramatically better results when students use it together instead of alone: about +0.42 standard deviations on knowledge and +0.64 on skills. Togetherness was the active ingredient all along.

This is why I get twitchy when a parent asks a school "how much screen time do you allow?" Fair question, wrong variable. The screen time hollowing kids out is the solitary kind: thirty kids in thirty sets of headphones, each disappearing into a private feed. Ask instead, "when my child is on a screen here, is she with other people, or alone?" You'll learn more from that answer than from any minutes-per-day policy.

The look-up test: five questions for any screen in your school

"Is my kid alone?" is the first cut. For the full read on a tool, here's the instrument we use at Mission.io. We call it the look-up test, and you can run it on anything in your building, including us.

1. Does it make kids look up or look down? When the tool is working, where are the eyes: at the device, or at each other and the teacher? You can collect that in ten seconds from the doorway. Posture is data.

2. Is it together or alone? This is the one that matters most, and the one with the most research behind it. One problem the whole room has to solve beats thirty kids on thirty screens doing thirty separate things, even when a screen is involved.

3. Is it teacher-led or teacher-light? Most edtech quietly asks the teacher to step aside and let the software run. Be suspicious. The teacher is still the most powerful technology in the room, and any tool that routes around her benches the best part of the school.

4. Is it a bounded event or an endless scroll? Lilypad's signature feature is that she never ends. A worthy classroom experience has a beginning, a hard middle, and an ending the kids talk about afterward. Endings are where learning gets processed.

5. Can you see what it built? If a tool eats an hour of class, you should be able to point at what grew: what students now know, what they can do, how they handled the part that was hard. "They were quiet" is not an outcome.

A tool doesn't need a perfect score to belong in a school. But a tool that fails all five isn't a learning tool. It's a babysitter with a login.

Run the test on a real classroom

Here's the test working, on the kind of class period we build at Mission.io. It's the example I know best, and the existence proof that a screen can pass.

A fifth-grade class is flying a damaged ship home, and the only way through is the science unit they spent the last two weeks on. (That's the part people miss: the Mission isn't the 45 minutes, it's the finale the unit was building toward.) Every decision plays out on one shared screen at the front, not thirty private ones (question one). The whole room owns the problem, and the data team is arguing with the navigation team, productively (question two). The teacher runs the floor, freezing the action to make a kid defend her answer with evidence (question three). It ends in 45 minutes with a debrief about the call they made together (question four). And she walks away able to see who applied the content and who pulled their team back from a bad turn (question five).

That's a Mission. The kid who never raises his hand just argued his whole crew out of a disaster, out loud, using the exact thing he learned that morning. Most screen time makes kids look down, alone. A Mission makes the whole class look up: at each other, at the problem, at their teacher. Thirty kids on their feet trying to save a ship is not the screen time anyone is trying to ban.

More than a million students have run Missions, backed by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, and this spring a New York Times piece taking the whole industry apart held us up as the exception. I'm biased, obviously. That's exactly why the test matters more than my opinion. Run it on us. Run it on everything.

What to do now that the lights are up

If you're a parent, see the movie, then ask your kid's school the better question. Not how much screen time. Whether your kid is alone.

If you're a teacher or principal, the audit is coming whether you invite it or not. Utah districts have to adopt a classroom-technology policy by 2027, and other states are close behind. Walk your building with the five questions before someone walks it with a stopwatch. A stopwatch will tell you to cut the best 45 minutes you've got for running long.

And to my own industry: Pixar held up a mirror, and flinching is the correct response. We don't fix this by defending the tablet. We fix it by building the kind of technology that would bore Lilypad to death. Loud, social, teacher-led, and over in 45 minutes.

Pixar made the case in two hours of animation. The look-up test takes ten seconds in a doorway. Both land in the same place: the fix for Lilypad was never less technology. It's technology that makes a classroom more human, not less.

The toys would approve.

FAQ

Is Toy Story 5 anti-technology? No. Director Andrew Stanton has said Lilypad isn't a villain, just "the next phase in Bonnie's life." The film's tension isn't toys versus technology. It's shared play versus solitary screen time. The same distinction applies in classrooms: the question isn't whether technology is present, it's whether it isolates kids or pulls them together around one problem.

What is Lilypad in Toy Story 5? Lilypad is a frog-shaped smart tablet, voiced by Greta Lee, who becomes Bonnie's constant companion in Toy Story 5 (in theaters since June 19, 2026). She's endlessly patient and always available, which is exactly why the toys can't compete for Bonnie's attention, and why parents recognize her on sight.

What is the difference between screen time and screen value? "Screen time" measures minutes and treats every minute as identical. "Screen value," a framing ISTE's Richard Culatta has pushed, measures what the screen actually asks a kid to do. Thirty minutes alone in a mindless game and thirty minutes solving a problem with classmates are not the same thirty minutes. Schools that count minutes will miss the difference; schools that measure value won't.

Is screen time at school bad for kids? It depends entirely on what the screen asks kids to do, which is why minute-counting is a weak signal. The same medium can be one of the better tools for teaching a young child to decode words and one of the worse places for that child to read for comprehension. Solitary, passive, open-ended screen use is what worries parents and legislators. Screen use that puts a whole class inside one problem, led by a teacher, with a clear ending and visible results, is a different thing entirely.

What is the look-up test? The look-up test is a five-question rubric for evaluating any screen in a school, used by Mission.io: Does it make kids look up or look down? Is it together or alone? Is it teacher-led or teacher-light? Is it a bounded event or an endless scroll? Can you see what it built? The second question, together or alone, carries the most weight and the most research.

How should schools respond to new screen-time laws and audits? Don't just count minutes. A minutes cap can pass a worksheet app and fail a great collaborative lesson that ran a little long. Inventory each tool against the look-up test instead: together or alone, teacher-led or teacher-light, bounded or endless, and whether you can show what it built. That gives boards and parents a defensible answer that doesn't require throwing out technology that's working.