There is a wonderful turning point in the movie ‘Fresh’ (1994) when 12-year-old Michael, surrounded by violence, drug dealers and ghetto enforcers, applies his father’s chess lessons to eliminating the forces that oppose him. Games are more than mere pastimes; they are frameworks for thinking. That is also why they make great teaching tools for humans and machines alike.

I am not entirely sure how it happened — but somehow in the last few years, I lost my connection with music. It could have been any number of things: throwing out my CD covers after I had ripped their insides, discarding playlists whilst moving between computers, a brief but horrific dalliance with iTunes Match or surfing the banal infinitudes of Spotify. Whatever the reason, the result was unequivocal — I had stopped listening to music, and had started consuming it.

You can only imagine what future anthropologists will make of the strange hieroglyphs that pepper our daily communications. Adults and teenagers alike have substituted words for icons of dancing women, smiley faces and ninjas. So is emoji just a fad, or a dress rehearsal for an even more profound evolution in human interaction?

The 21st century is a wonderful time to be a kid. Never has so much information, entertainment and wonder been so readily available to any child with access to a connected device — it is, in other words, a tough time to be a parent. Technology dominates our adult work and personal lives, but what role should it play in childhood and learning?