Engl. transl.: Digital skills and the cyber addiction at primary school

This paper considers the problem of Internet and more general cyber addiction of primary school children. The aim is to investigate the level of dependency of young children in Internet, computer games and devices. The authors work is part of a project work researching digital skills and media-education at early age. A survey with 274 fourth grade students is described and analyzed in the context of the tendency to meet and fall in love with the screen from a younger age. Young children do not recognize the eager to take some digital device at hand as a problem. They cannot really estimate the time spent on games or other online activities. Theoretical review of the problem is done, and the basic aspects of cyber addiction are mentioned. The authors’ point of view is that higher digital skills at early age could be a factor for avoiding higher cyber addiction of the children.

Almost half of the children say that they use their devices a little every day for different purposes, but mostly for fun and games, and less for searching for information and school preparation. When summarized the students’ answers allow to conclude that they use digital devices as follows: seldom - 5%, very often - 15%, only for school and with parent’s permission - 18%, a few hours a day - 55%. The number of respondents who say that they have a phone in hand all the time is relatively small. "However, these results are worrying because they show that the problem of cyber-addiction is probably not widespread but affects children from an early age. Playing games or staying online all the time is not a good sign, especially in early age". Relatively fewer children say they feel sad, angry, tense, nervous, angry and robbed while almost every student claimed that they feel indifferently when unable to use its devices. "Observations, however, show that anytime that a child is not involved in the learning process, it reaches its phone. There is another interesting phenomenon: the other students do something else, but passing by a child playing on the phone, they immediately ‘stick’ to it. This can be seen every day in the contemporary Bulgarian school". (Extracted and paraphrased from part 4. Results)