It was a "what would the effect of" story - Speculative Fiction, not really Science Fiction. Certainly a far cry from hard SF.
But that's not a bad thing. Sure, the device operated, for all intents and purposes, by magic. That doesn't change that the story took that one element and tried to envision how it would change the world. And it used that as a mirror for our world in general. That's classic SF right there. And it was a good, fun story. I really liked the father/daughter dynamic as well, showing very clearly how both of them are concerned about very, very different things.
The moral of the story: Even if you could show them the future, teenagers are only concerned with the now.