I love technology. I mean, I really do: my dad worked with computers, so we had one at home from the time I was small, on which I once attempted to use DOS to reprogram a game in which you hunted a frog across a treasure map so I could more easily beat my younger brothers. I am obsessed with tech gadgets and own far more than I need.

In short, I’m not a tech hater. Love the stuff. And when I first became a classroom teacher, I wanted to use that enthusiasm in my practice. But I tell you, nothing beats tech evangelism out of you more effectively than contact with the classroom. Broken projectors, defunct voting handsets, uncharged iPads - the logistics alone are annoying.

But it is more than that: most edtech doesn’t fail because it is awkward to use, but because it doesn’t do anything teachers or students want or need - I’m looking at you, interactive whiteboards.

And that goes double for anything people think will work in the classroom because it mirrors something used at home. Today’s offering is from Mohit Midha, the chief executive of Mangahigh, who said that children can learn through video games. After all, he says, if you give a kid FIFA18, and come back two days later, he’ll be scoring goals. There’s no need, says Midha, for “the instructional phase”.

Leaving aside the fact that this is a ridiculous account of learning - outside of certain primary functions like speech acquisition, if there’s no instructional phase, there is no learning - this is simply not an accurate description of how computer games work. As I say, I like technology and I play computers games a lot; even as having children means I have no time to buy them, let alone play them, I have still bought every edition of PC Gamer for the past 15 years; now my kids are getting into them, and I’m all for that.

And games all have an instructional phase: they have a manual or an in-game tutorial or online guides, both video and text, or all three. Learning how to play Minecraft isn’t a matter of making it up, or why are there tens of thousands of hours of walkthroughs and suggestions available on YouTube? Even if games didn’t have this, the common conventions of gaming built up over the past decades mean relatively experienced gamers will be able to pick up a controller and get going anyway. That’s not a lack of an instructional phase, it is one bedded so deep into the patterns of childhood we barely notice it anymore.

Vast amounts of money and time have been invested by entertainment companies to ensure this is so. Amazed your toddler can use an iPad? I’d be amazed if they couldn’t, and Apple’s execs would be furious - they’ve paid a fortune to make that interface feel intuitive to absolutely anybody.

What is so frustrating about this is that there is so obviously a role for judiciously deployed technology in supporting teachers. Low stakes testing with instant analysis of results; resource sharing; I recently saw a digital reconstruction of Ancient Rome that opened up the chance to share with young people objects and places impossible for them to access otherwise. If edtech companies dedicated themselves to supporting teachers do “the instructional phase” and “the assessment phase” and “the feedback stage”, they could make a real difference to teachers and produce a product that might actually make money since people would buy what is useful.

I broke that frog game when I tried to reprogram it: maybe a bit longer on the instructional phase would have done me good. The same could be said for too many of our edtech sector.

John David Blake is a writer, educationalist and curriculum designer, having previously been a state-school history teacher for 10 years