What is Phy-gital? And why do we need it in this Internet-AI Era?

If you are someone with a child, or a baby sibling, or someone in education, you must have faced this one dilemma too: kids today are addicted to their phones a tad bit too much, and the content they are exposed to isn’t meaningful but random ‘brain rot ’! But why is this so?

Blended learning or Phygital learning in schools or home.

This is all because there is no such thing as only physical (traditional) education being good or only digital education being good. We are all fighting over a lost battle here. The balance created between these two is what will work in the 21st Century and Internet+AI Era. This is what will lead to a healthy environment for kids and adults both as we all are navigating this entirely new era.

Kids mimic their parents from a young age

And this isn’t something that only children have to do; it's a collaborative yet more responsible effort from the parents' side. Kids learn the most from their parents; they copy/mimic their parents’ day-to-day activities, even the smallest habits. So, if parents make time to spend and do activities with their child, this would promote a parent-child bond between them. This would condition their mind and encourage them to learn more if they see their parents do the same.

For Example:

When I was a toddler, I would pretend to read newspapers coz my father used to read them every day. I couldn’t read back then, but the habit of opening a newspaper or a book became natural to me that I would patiently listen to my parents as they would read out the storybooks, or when my cousin sister would enact a story using my toys just to keep me invested. This later led me to develop a keen interest in reading from an early age.

Also, the enactment thing? I did that with my baby brother and cousins too when they were kids. This process made me a storyteller too, not just in terms of writing but also when I am sharing an incident or old story with friends and family; I know how to begin, what to share, and how to share to keep them hooked till the end. Even in creative writing, I began writing short stories and small school plays (even directing them) back in class 5th.

Why am I interested in Phygital?

Back in 2023, HOTSPOD was created. Stands for Higher-Order Thinking Skills Pod, which is offline (hence safe & secure) and aligns with the NEP 2020, focusing on ECE-FLN (Early Childhood Education and Foundational Literacy & Numeracy), 21st Century Skills that are needed for a child to learn to survive the current generation, i.e., the world.

The motivation behind curating HOTSPOD

The HOTSPOD is a plug-and-play device that was filled with content focusing on the said areas; the content consisted of typing, coding (for kids), simulation-based learning for science and math concepts, Math GPA games, gamified learning concepts for science, math & English, curated TedEd videos, and DIY tinkering videos.

The bigger version of this product already exists, named School-In-A-Box, which is used in Government Schools and Community Learning Centers (Classes 5th to 10th) across India (19 States, 200+ Schools). We wanted to curate and build one for younger children who are exposed to internet content at a young age, where they should be developing their fundamentals for further growth and studies. This was paired with a 31-day activity calendar for children to do with their parents, promoting the parent-child bond.

Teachers conducting their daily classes using the School-In-A-Box server for an experiential & balanced learning.

The device was shared with 10 parents for a month (summer vacations) in 2023, the pre-AI era. We were able to see positive responses from the parents who tried following the calendar as much as they could despite their busy schedules.

See, the product could never automatically dominate the child’s online content consumption time, but again, that was never the idea. The idea was to make parents aware of the situation and switch the internet with HOTSPOD. It was they who had to make their kids' interests divert to what they think is the most productive. I will share one example from the playbook trial a parent shared with us.

A 4-year-old kid, after watching and understanding a TED-Ed video with his mother on Goddess Annapurna, understood the value of food. How sacred and important it is, how blessed he is to have it, and started respecting his food more. To the point that he would tell his parents and grandparents not to leave leftovers on their plate, or else the goddess would be sad and angry. A small yet healthy start, right? Learning something from a video, discussing it with your parent(s), and then implementing your learnings in real life- isn’t this what all phygital is about?

Krish, Trish & Baltiboy: Working as musical minstrels, they travel across India to narrate colorful, culturally rich folktales and historical stories to children.

We as parents, teachers, and guardians have to learn the art of balancing teaching and learning for the coming generation. Millennials and early Gen Z were addicted to television because it was new and fascinating, but then the content was tightly controlled. Controlled, as in it was carefully curated and made safe as well. Let me just compare the cartoons that used to air when my baby brother and I were growing up (we have an 8-year age gap). The cartoons I watched were Doraemon, Kitretsu, Detective Conan, Scooby Doo, Power Rangers, etc. For my brother, it was some of the previous ones along with Krish, Trish & Baltiboy, Sally Bollywood, Phineas and Ferb, Spider-Man, etc. Nowadays, the cartoons hardly exist; if they do, they have the worst dubbing in an accent and use of words that kids catch on quickly.

This isn’t just me or the research papers or the statistics or the news noticing. The mainstream media has a say on this too. In 2025, Pixar stated this problem with their successful movie franchise Toy Story by introducing a new character named “Lilypad” in the 5th installment of the film. Lilypad is nothing but an iPad or tablet that is making kids addicted to it, isolating them from their friends coz all are focused on their “Lilypads”. And if kids are not on the pad and playing with toys (like normal kids do), they feel left out or are made fun of by the other kids. If you see the movie closely, you will notice the fault belongs to the parents. They are the ones who gifted it to their kids at an early age with no guidance on how to use it properly, i.e., teaching them to maintain a phygital relationship.

The one thing I noticed was how the parents were in this story; they weren’t paying much attention to their kids' screen time or the change in behaviour altogether.

This isn’t just a movie; the kids (including toddlers) in the real world are addicted to their phones and tablets, consuming whatever the algorithm throws at them or whatever an AI app writes for them. Who is at fault? The child who can’t understand what's good and bad for them? The algorithm that just reads the account’s content consumption patterns and suggests more accordingly? Or the parents who don’t understand the problem and guide their child accordingly?

The internet isn’t a baby pacifier; it's vast and knowledgeable and dark and distracting all at the same time. When adults can get lost in this, how can we expect a child to navigate through it like an expert unless they were taught how to do so in the womb like Abhimanyu?

I would like to repeat myself again: We as parents, teachers, and guardians have to learn the art of balancing teaching and learning for the coming generation. And with this, I conclude my point on why phygital!