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Comment by kevinconroy | Hacker News Reader

As a parent who has two kids who have ClassDojo, I can say that ClassDojo supports points for any teacher defined criteria. I this case I believe it was a teacher-defined point system, not the default app settings.

So while it’s all good to discuss gamification and the dark side of these things, it’s not the apps designer that decided to negatively reinforce bathroom breaks, but their app did allow the teacher to set that up.

What other user defined settings and unintended dark patterns are out there?

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As I see it, the problem with the app is not only that kids lose points for bathroom breaks. That's just the most outragous part, but it distracts from the core of the problem.

The problem is how this app is designed to enforce absolute discipline and completely disregards the students need for privacy.

Can you imagine how terrible it would be if you had a bad day, were a bit distracted in school, got yelled at by the teacher, only to have your mom text you to tell you off for not behaving in school?

The app would be just as bad without the bathroom break part.

As developers / product designers we can't always hide behind our users, by claiming that we can't influence how they use our products. Some products simply encourage bad behaviour, and we should take at least some responsibility for what people do with them.

This still isn't the app. A teacher could just as easily email the parent for the same having a bad day thing you're talking about. My daughter's school has a similar app. I can basically see her attendance record and what her grades are. How I react to that data is on me.

There's multiple levels of abstraction on the bathroom tracking issue. The fact that children pretty universally abuse bathroom breaks to skip class, and parents/teachers/administrators sometimes try to deal with such problems in a stupid way is only one level. The other level of abstraction, as Michael Malice puts it... "Public schools are literal prisons for children and for most people is the only time in their life they'll experience violence first hand." That might be beyond the scope of this discussion, but it's part of the culture of school that leads to kids skipping school and escalating punitive consequences.

You could say that about anything. The problems with Facebook isn't Facebook because there are other social media websites. Guns aren't a problem because people stab each other with knives.

It's encouraging and normalising a behaviour where it shouldn't, that's the problem.

>It's encouraging and normalising a behaviour where it shouldn't, that's the problem.

I think you're extrapolating too much from a data point of one. One teacher reportedly is a busybody and reports dumb shit to parents like whether or not kids go to the bathroom.

Would she have done that without the app though? Pre app did she send out daily itemised emails to all the parents?

I'm not even criticising the toilet break thing per se, just the entire concept of breaking down a kids day into little +1s and -1s. As a parent I want to know if he learnt anything, whether he enjoyed himself, that he was well behaved. A score of X doesn't help with any of those.

Sending out daily itemized emails to parents was previously limited to students who frequently caused disruptions.

However, I remember teachers gamifying classroom behavior when I was a kid with points systems and rewards. Context and content matters a lot. A first grader is going to love it if their parents mention how great they did at school because they were a team player or helped a friend. A middle/high schooler will be mortified to get the same report. I would ask the teacher to stuff it if she was recording my daughter's bathroom breaks, but what if my kid was having some kind of problem where they were cutting class by taking excessive bathroom breaks? Then I'd start wanting some records.

"if my kid was having some kind of problem where they were cutting class by taking excessive bathroom breaks?"

This app presumably just leaves the ball in the parents court? If there were a problem I'd expect the teacher to be proactively dealing with it, and/or discussing it with me.

"Context and content matters a lot"

Agreed, half the problem is that this loses context.

toilet break -1

Where's the context there? Is that a problem? Normal?

I don't have a problem with gold stars and stuff, this is just depersonalising and not helpful.

The fact that this screenshot was posted by a stranger on Twitter is what removed the context. That's why the harsh reaction doesn't make any sense. We have no idea what has been going on in that classroom or with that particular kid. Hell, we don't even know if it's real.

> A score of X doesn't help with any of those.

The only advantage is that it provide subpoena-able data empirically proving that most teachers have it in for certain classes of students, whether they are aware of it or not. The data is ripe for both academic study and class discrimination lawsuits and the sooner the better.

This isn't gamification; this is a violation of a child's privacy, and teaches kids that if they don't toe the line and follow whatever arbitrary rules someone in power has designed for them, they get in trouble. I'm genuinely appalled that this even exists. This is one step away from some kind of social credit system.

Sounds like school in the USA (as well as many other countries). Tech is just making that aspect more explicit.

Supposedly public schools in the states were created during the industrial revolution to train up obedient factory workers. Private schools before that were founded to train up a nobility steeped in hierarchy.

>>> if they don't toe the line and follow whatever arbitrary rules someone in power has designed for them, they get in trouble.

this

As a parent I struggle horribly not to make up arbitrary rules and then come down on them for it - it should not be part of the school bestoractise

> if they don't toe the line and follow whatever arbitrary rules someone in power has designed for them, they get in trouble

Sounds like good practice.

Sure if you want your kid to grow up into a dumb grunt.

I agree, but I think his comment was sarcastic as that's an actual argument I have heard people make against homeschooling: "Bullying is no reason to homeschool. In public school your student will be bullied and learn how to deal with it. This is important life experience because it's how the real workplace is. Homeschooled students can not function in the workplace because they never learned how to handle the bullying." In other worlds the world is abusive, so there is a moral obligation to abuse our children so they learn to get used to it. Homeschooling parents are thus cast as abusing their children by not subjecting them to the constant abuse that describes the life long personal experiences of the anti-homeschooling advocate, who can't imagine any other world beyond daily abuse, belittling, nagging and worse, all seen as good for you as it makes you tough. Similar to the philosophy of the ancient Spartans who threw their babies off of cliffs and those who survived were strong enough to be Spartans.

Same here and can confirm the scoring is up to the teacher.

At this point the title should be changed to reflect that a singular teacher decided to score their students based on taking a bathroom break.

The app permitted a teacher to do this, and the existence of the app and its delivery of this outcome jibe with the existing headline.

“Apple penalizes fifth graders...” should be the headline by this logic. Apple permitted the app to do this.

Following your logic we should see headlines like "Hammer kills men"

Because we never see articles on guns killing people, right?

I don’t understand what a hammer has to do with a story about an app that lets teachers score children by arbitrary teacher-specified criteria (without evaluation by an independent review board) and publish a feed to their parents of the scores with no oversight. Could you explain more?

Teachers are allowed to talk to students, and even discipline them, without the oversight of a review board!

Application is a tool, teacher is a user of given tool. Headline implies that tool is to penalize children, while in reality it is a decision of teacher. If that app would not exist, children were still penalized.

Tools deserve review and critique to determine whether they are good, neutral, and/or bad for society; and whether their use should be controlled or uncontrolled for societal good. For example, three such judgements as society sees them today from agricultural inventions:

Shovel: Neutral-Good (farming), Uncontrolled (it’s very unlikely you can do much harm to society with a shovel)

Backhoe: Neutral/Good (efficiency), Controlled (heavy machinery can easily kill people and damage infrastructure)

Agent Orange: Bad (imprecise, damaging, disease-inducing), Controlled (considered a chemical weapon with no legitimate societal use)

Why would you expect oversight for something like this? Would you also expect an independent review board to provide oversight for the teacher giving a student a note to bring home that says "your kid went to the bathroom during class"?

Part of the valuable purpose I see in schools is to provide children the experience of living a life apart from their parents, in a setting that offers them carefully-monitored self direction. HN has had several high-scoring front page posts about mistreatments of Amazon’s warehouse workers and contract delivery drivers, in which many suggest they are unable to take bathroom breaks. This is considered to be abusive behavior by many people, and labor laws exist specifically to prevent such abuses as they’ve occurred in the past. Censuring a child for needing to go to the bathroom — literally docking them a Meowmeowbeenz point! — is beyond acceptable. Writing a note saying “your kid seems to go to the bathroom excessively” is completely appropriate, but not what we’re discussing here.

So I think that more oversight should be used in order to prevent teachers with bad and abusive efficiency strategies from, for example, downvoting children for needing to pee.

Would you blame the pen & paper company if the teacher sent the parents a note about how naughty their child is?

If pen and paper had been invented in the past twenty years, I would absolutely shine a spotlight on this kind of unexpected outcome from its invention and use by teachers.

As others have mentioned, it’s parameterization all the way down. If the teacher was using JavaScript to do this, should we blame their web stack as being complicit and enabling?

The medium is the message.

What effects does logging every micro-level event with near-instant feedback loop between teacher, pupil and parent have towards accomplishing the goals of primary school?

If you think tracking bathroom use is a "dark pattern" of this technology, what non-dark uses does it enable or enhance that previous - less capable - tools don't?

We got spiral-bound daily planners for homework with a section at the bottom of each day for hall passes / late passes. When deciding to issue one, the teacher could check what you had already been issued that day, or even thumb through your history. Desire to track this stuff predates classroom tech.

Does ClassDojo provide supporting material with a didactic foundation on how to effectively use the app? Do schools or teacher associations provide such material? IMHO, without such guidance, it is irresponsible to use these apps.

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