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A new classroom and playground craze has children enthralled and teachers despairing as fidget spinners are snapped off the shelves of supermarkets and village stores in Bahrain.
Youngsters say it stops them chewing on the ends of pens and pencils and helps them concentrate during the spring exam season but educators reckon they are a distraction and dangerous too.
As fidget spinners have risen in popularity during 2017 across the globe, some experts have suggested benefits for individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism and anxiety by acting as a release mechanism for nervous energy or stress.
GulfWeekly education columnist, Chris Fenton, a head teacher in Bahrain, is far from convinced and described them as a ‘nuisance’ with a few off-the-record expletives.
“In a more printable nutshell, fidget spinners are toys and toys should not be allowed in schools,” he said. “They distract students, cause arguments, encourage pilfering and ultimately tears when they are confiscated.
“They are potentially lethal weapons as witnessed when one was thrown across one of our playgrounds and walloped an 11-year-old on the forehead - knocking him to the ground and leaving him with a lump.
“They are blunt throwing stars and should not be encouraged in educational environments at all. There is no evidence to suggest that they aid concentration and indeed, in my opinion, it is a very clever marketing tool to use the word ‘fidget’ in the title suggesting that it is an educational aid.”
Basic fidget spinners, costing anything from a few hundred fils to a couple of dinars, consist of a two-or-three-pronged design with bearings in a centre circular pad. They are made from any of a variety of materials including brass, stainless steel, titanium, copper and plastic and many light up when rotating. An individual holds the centre while the toy spins.
Additionally, bearings can be different to adjust for the design’s spin time, vibration and noise leading to unique sensory feedback.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus, co-founder of a coaching service for children with attention disorders and their parents, said: “For some people with ADHD there’s a need for constant stimulation. What a fidget allows some people – not all people – with ADHD to do is to focus their attention on what they want to focus on, because there’s sort of a background motion that’s occupying that need.”
The origins of the spinner trace back to what its US inventor, Catherine A. Hettinger, described as ‘one horrible summer’ in 1993. She was suffering from an illness, making it difficult to care for her daughter.
She recalled: “I couldn’t pick up her toys or play with her much at all, so I started throwing things together.”
The spinner went through several redesigns until a basic, non-mechanical version was created and she started selling them at arts and craft fairs around Florida. Catherine secured a patent on the device in 1997 and toy manufacturing company Hasbro tested the design but decided not to proceed with production, and after not being able to afford the $400 renewal fee for her patent, she surrendered it in 2005.
Many manufacturers later began creating spinners in different shapes and designs and the inventor made no money from the sales.
This spring, the fidget spinner’s popularity began to increase greatly and earlier this month variations occupied every spot on online retailer Amazon’s Top 20 best-seller list for toys.
Some analysts referred to the fidget spinner as a fad, comparing it to water bottle flipping’s rise in popularity from 2016 but others report that ‘stores can’t keep them in stock’.
Schoolboy Daniel Thornley, 14, an Australian expat who has lived in Bahrain since he was four, said: “I use it in class so that I don’t have to fidget with my pens and pencils. Now they stay in good condition, in the past I would chew the end of them or bend them without realising.
“A few of my stricter teachers don’t like us using them but most are OK with it. It really helps with concentrating too, especially during revision. You hold them in the middle and spin the outside and they go on spinning for what seems like forever. They are really popular, almost everyone has them.”
