The Clocky Alarm Clock on Wheels Actually Got My Teen Out of Bed

• Durability: 20/20
• Attractiveness: 20/20
• Ease of Use: 16/20
• Display Clarity: 18/20
• Effectiveness: 17/20
• Total: 91/100

My 16 year-old son really likes his sleep, but since high school isn’t going to attend itself, we’ve tried a wide range of methods to wake him up. He sleeps through his phone alarm and hits the snooze bar on the range of bedside alarms we’ve tried, eventually falling back into a deeper sleep or just pulling out the cord to shut the darn thing up. The best wake-up method was our family therapist-directed “sprinkle water on his face” (my teen agreed to try it, promise); however, that’s not a sustainable solution. (Mom can’t always be there with a spray bottle, right?) So, when I heard about the Clocky, a Shark Tank-endorsed alarm clock that rolls away from snooze button-abusing sleepers, I had to offer my son as tribute for back-to-school shoppers everywhere.

First, I tried the product myself for a week—I’m a heavy sleeper who finds it easy to spring right out of bed. Next my son used it for a month—he’s a heavy sleeper who finds it easy to both not hear alarms and then, once snoozing them, to burrow back under the covers. We each agreed to do our best to sleep through it, but also test it for things like usability (How easy was it to set up?), functionality (Does it roll away as promised? Does it get stuck?) and overall enjoyability, to the extent that an alarm clock is ever enjoyable.

The 5.25-by-3.5-inch clock looks like no other alarm clock you’ve ever seen—the central egg-shaped plastic body comes in cheery light blue, navy, red, pink, white or chrome and has a central LED back-lit time readout. On either side of the main chassis there are four-inch wheels with tread. Overall, the effect is of an inexpensive portable alarm clock (it takes 4 AAA batteries) crossed with a toy monster truck.

There are four primary buttons: Hour, Minute, Alarm and Time. The time and alarm are intuitive to set. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t ring like a traditional wind-up alarm or play peaceful sitar riffs like your iPhone lets you choose. No, this alarm sets itself apart by spitting out a series of metallic buzzing, tittering and humming noises including what seems to be a recording of a dial-up modem circa 1991. Overall, the sound is annoying, as if R2D2 guzzled a little too much motor oil and won’t stop shrieking at you in a crowded club. The rolling function can be disabled, but it’s the full drunk-droid experience we are after here—so if you’ve set the circle “rolling” button, the little guy hops off your bedside table and rolls around on the floor a few feet away, noises blazing.

When using it, my son noted that even after the alarm jumped to his bedside floor, it is still loud enough to really motivate you to get out of bed to turn it off. In fact, we could hear it through his bedroom wall. Because he’s a teen, a member of my household or for whatever reason, my son keeps piles of clothes and shoes on his floor, so Clocky didn’t have a lot of rolling room to work with, and certainly couldn’t hide electronically screaming under the bed like in some TikToks.

In my room, Clocky’s blaring wake-up call shot me upright immediately, or perhaps it was the angry barking of the alarmed family dogs that did it—the immediate swirl of activity with the two barking and snapping at the new noisy rolling dog toy on the floor was a LOT. I got up right away to pull them off Clocky, better to save its little forty-dollar life to alarm another day. After a week of pulling my dogs off my alarm clock, for my room I’ll probably switch the rolling function off so that the wild kingdom in here doesn’t go medieval on the clock’s chassis.

So did it work? Absolutely. Clocky’s cute little pushiness, its inventive design, how easy it was to set up—all that helped to get my son (and sleepover friends) up and out of bed. As for long-term effectiveness, I am reminded of a joke: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one—but the light bulb has to really want to change. In other words, I can’t make my son remember to set the alarm, but thanks to Clocky, I know that I can count on outside-the-box thinking to get him out of bed.

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