Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
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If you haven't already seen one, I'd book an appointment with a psychiatrist and/or a psychologist. I wish my parents had done so when I was the student with trouble focusing so I could have received the help I desperately needed but never got, which made school miserable.
Your kid is going to have internet connected devices around him his whole life, so figuring out how to focus in spite of them is important, and there's nothing wrong with asking specialists for help.
However, people often ignore that there is an equal and opposite side to that coin, and people with ADHD can hyperfocus to an absurd degree on tasks they enjoy. An internet connection and a desire to learn something is a powerful combination for someone who can shut out everything else in the world for several hours at a time.
If you have a job you enjoy, ADHD is usually a boon. Unfortunately, high school is mostly stuff that falls into the "very difficult" category.
My personal experience is that I simply can't direct that hyperfocus. While I tend to hyperfocus on things that my brain considers "fun", the object of obsession is changing frequently (today it's some programming language, next week it's something totally unrelated like lets say hypnosis). Never enough time to build a foundation in that field/topic. For me, the ADHD is debilitating, and not some type "superpower", as I've read numerous times.
Suggesting ADHD to parents any time kids struggle is such a comical cliche. Of course it could be that, but when you hear hooves outside the door think horses not zebras.
It’s like if there was a tv playing in every classroom. Imagine how distracting that is.
I remember reading Ender’s Game and how the kids used tablets and thinking how great that would be. Instead schools wrote zero software and just plopped shitty vanilla windows that shows Kim kardashian news when you open a new tab and expected kids to stitch together their own education plans.
As a parent it’s been hard experiencing schools get through this learning period and maybe one day it will be good.
But I had two different schools with two different kids suggest adhd as the reason my kids struggle with an average of 21 different apps used in 6 classes each throughout the year. Of course physicians said no. But it’s funny how all of a sudden schools are detecting growth in adhd at the same time they’re issuing laptops.
While true, it’s silly to suggest it in response to a problem occurring due to school laptops. It’s like reminding people that meditation and exercise are valuable.
It’s like when I’m menstruating and someone says “honestly it doesn’t hurt for a teen to have someone who they can talk to who is not their parent/authority figure.” Definitely true, but not relevant to the issue at hand. I think it comes from an intent to help and nurture, but it sounds like lalaland nonsense that just makes the conversation harder by spending time on something that doesn’t seem useful.
Of course, you don’t know who has availability to use healthcare to diagnose so it may help sometimes for people who truly have undiagnosed ADHD. Or for people who don’t know that it helps teen to be able to talk to people who have their shit together.
But I find that the problem is way more frequently that teens know how valuable it is to talk with people, but don’t have the resources or ability to find and use those people. So it’s like telling a homeless person how useful getting a job would be. Or a fat person that it’s possible to lose weight through diet and exercise. Yes, yes, let’s spend energy on actionable interventions.
You don't know if the lack of attention is being caused by the laptop, since I assume there are other kids in the class also with laptops who are able to concentrate?
So I spent a week not taking the medication and then saying I did. Got positive feedback and praise. Spent a week taking the medication and saying I didn't, got criticism and a disappointed condescending tone. The medication cost was high and a burden my family could not really afford, and since the teacher couldn't seem to tell the difference, I stopped taking the medication and received much criticism.
Directly before my ADHD diagnosis I was transferred out of a class due to extreme neglect and abuse, and the schools just chalked up my subsequent struggles to my brain being fucked up due to bad genes. When I did present an actual chronic health issue and several symptoms around the same time, given the school had the hypothesis "this child is doing badly in school because they have a health condition" you might think they would pay attention to this new evidence, but they already had their excuse so they just accused me of malingering.
I've been VERY cynical about the paediatric mental health system for a long time because there's strong conflicts of interest, I don't think the system is open to the idea of falsifying its own theories, and people aren't meaningfully measuring student outcomes after they experiment with their theories. I specifically detest how amphetamine and methylphenidate access is gate-kept until a doctor calls you "disordered", and it's treated as common ethical sense to force people to adopt an insulting label if they want access to certain medications.
There is a middle ground, a concept that is so utterly lacking in the modern world.
ADHD is real. Unfortunately, there's no direct physiological test for it, it has to be observed via behavioral analysis, thus it's possible to get wrong. It's also not properly accepted as the disability that it can be without support and treatment. If a person has it, and is not properly treated at a young age, then that person is likely to have low chances in being able to get treatment as an adult. At that point, it basically relies on the individual being able to find a doctor who doesn't dismiss their concerns (because people are human and make mistakes, or have incorrect understandings).
ADHD medications are also very highly regulated, far more than opioids and other far more dangerous-when-abused medications. If an ADHD person is prevented from obtaining their medication due to factors out of their control, they risk major setbacks in all areas of their life that can be extremely hard to bounce back from without some type of external support.
Increased numbers of ADHD diagnoses does not necessarily indicate over-diagnosis. Of course the numbers of diagnoses will increase, how could there ever be a diagnosis before ADHD was identified and labeled? In the early 20th century, it was called "brain-injured child syndrome" and later "minimal brain damage". Those words also would have an associated meaning in the public eye, and people have historically not been good at dealing with things like "brain damage" and "abnormal people", so things like that tend to come with the baggage of stigma, further reducing chances of success and happiness in life.
I was diagnosed with ADD in the late 80s, when I was 7 or 8. Just on a personal, observational level, I can tell that I definitely have focus control issues in the classical ADHD way - things that don't interest my mind are nearly impossible to focus on, but things that tickle my mind's itch are extremely easy to focus on. There's also not control over which group any given thing falls into. I'm extremely sensitive to physical stimulation, unless something else overrides that on a physical level (like the aforementioned hyperfocus). Stimulants slow me down, rather than speeding me up (this is probably a good test for likelihood of ADHD). For certain things, my brain figures things out extremely fast (one of these days I might try to go on Wheel of Fortune lol). This is just "the way life is" for me, always has been since I can remember.
I would honestly like to see more research into how psychedelics interplay with ADHD. A few years back, I had a particularly deep experience with DMT that revolutionized how I think about time and human perception. It also fundamentally changed my focus control abilities for at least a good three months. At the risk of introducing a bit of "woo", it almost felt like the universe fed me a massive data-dump, that even to this day comes out in the form of my gut feeling. I've also had improved peripheral vision since this experience. I've also had similar, shorter lasting effects from LSD and mushrooms. I think there is a woefully untapped resource in psychedelics, that would be very useful for ADHD individuals. I think even a mindful, rigid microdosing regimen would be extremely helpful, with less of the side effects that stimulant-based drugs have. I believe this to be due to stimulant-like properties of the classical psychedelics.
Being from the poor, rural south I know far more who only did your first part and now are not doing well at all, or are dead.
I’m not happy with the odds when risking my own kid.
:)
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Check out “The Male Brain”
I’ve advised a lot of parents at this stage, the prescription is always the same:
Let go of extrinsic motivation (their brains are severely muted against it)
Focus on cultivating empty time & space to find intrinsic motivation
As a dad myself, even with this knowledge, it was scary to take off expectations and let my boys flounder
But for both of them, as well as for the many other young men whose parents went this path, their son found their “thing”
Once that took hold, achievement became their obsession
We cannot expect boys to pursue excellence out of pleasing others or meeting some societal bar. It’s not sustainable, healthy, or effective.
They need to experience the existential terror of “what am I going to do with my life?” without guardrails
There are some boys who do excel at whatever their parents tell them to do, but that just delays this process to their 20s - meaning that all the investment made in college usually has minimal impact on what they actually end up doing.
It's funny. My school had block scheduling, so four coursers per day at 80 minutes a piece, and a really insanely large catalogue of electives. We were the only school in the area and some kids' bus ride was 30 minutes or more, so it was very very well funded and had a lot of trade programs. I did a lot of dabbling. I always did horribly in my actual required classes, but on the flipside, found a lot of passion and fulfillment in the classes where, for the entirety of the semester, you kind of just had a single project that you were working on by yourself. You showed up to the room to check in and then just used the facilities to kind of do your own thing.
I did all kinds of stuff. An electronics class, photography, jewelry making, metalcrafting, shop, programming. I actually believe it's a huge part of why I was able to even finish school in the first place.
> But for both of them, as well as for the many other young men whose parents went this path, their son found their “thing”
I started programming when I was 11, so even high school felt like kind of a joke, as I knew what I was going to do and also knew that high school for the most part wasn't teaching me it. Generally kind of a distraction.
> but that just delays this process to their 20s
I would say I still haven't really had this process. For better or worse, I guess.
The only thing we've found that works is removing technology as much as possible, which, once the immediate habit was interrupted, he's been very grateful for.
I’m concerned about the mental impact of a sedentary society.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I had my own laptop. Absolutely refused to ask for a replacement for it even when the hinge died because the exploit was patched in the new version of deepfreeze the school was using.
Some of my first experience with reverse engineering/pentesting methodologies came from extracting flash games from websites so they could run without getting net-nannied, or learning that you could use google translate to run a makeshift web proxy.
Honestly helped kickstart a lot of my learning about computers.
That was the era of painfully slow (~10min) windows boot times. At one point, teenage me had a floppy with unetbootin to boot a flash drive with tinycore. I could get a browser running a solid 8min. before anyone else.
Regardless of the fun, there was still a dark side. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt should not be the foundation of education.
One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked because the word "breast" appears).
Then the student presents the laptop to the teacher, who types in the exception password. Since the keylogger is running, the student can now grant himself exceptions to his heart's content.
The school eventually figured this out. It's not clear how they avoid the situation however; do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices?
Entering the password on the student’s BYOD is pretty stupid
I wouldn't say it was stupid of the teacher to enter the password, given the amount of technical expertise that elementary school teachers can be expected to possess.
The blame should probably go to the person who set up the exception-granting system, who should have used a system that doesn't involve authenticating on a non-trusted device.
the target of the exception and the device granting the exception do not need to be the same device necessarily. if you have that figured out then yes only allow password entry on locked-down devices.
Indeed: this is almost exactly the attack type TOTP was designed for.
The idea was that if someone intercepted your network traffic and captured your password, it wouldn't do them any good without also having your code generator.
It turns out that if you have a live MitM connection there are ways around that problem, but TOTP is still helpful against other attacks.
I agree that for this situation, it's probably better to focus on detection than bulletproof enforcement.
Make it so the firewall exception process on student devices gives a 6 digit code which the instructor enters into a staff-only interface on the instructor's device, so that the process always requires input on both a student and an instructor's computer.
Yes. This is correct from both a security and educational perspective. What kind of example does the opposite set for children?
Having root type into someone else’s machine that they control is a total noob move and it’s funny the teacher fell for it.
Of course since the student is using a custom machine it’s likely they have a specific ip, host name, and traffic pattern that can identify them (eg, look at the requests across 7 different classrooms and find the single student that’s in all of them before the password spreads too much). Then they can intervene and punish the kid.
Keyloggers aren’t particularly clever or “hackery” and are just a social engineering hack so it’s more malicious than exploratory.
But I’d hope the school doesn’t crack down too hard and instead uses it to teach kids that if you want to be clever you have to be very clever.
>You can use certificate based authentication instead of password based. Certificate based authentication COMPLETELY prevents this attack because the student's computer never sees the private key which actually authenticates the teacher to bypass
>You can use time based one-time passwords/HMAC instead of using certificates, with a teacher pulling up an app
>You can have the computer have its password managed by a centralised store which has the ability to rotate said password. When the teacher needs to unlock a computer, they request that computers password from the centralised store, and after it's used, the password is then rotated.
>What I would recommend the most, is just giving each teacher their own credentials and sending the teacher an alert when their credentials were used.
You could easily lock this down, but I honestly don't think it's a good idea. I think using weak security measures actually has a merit, as it grants the teacher some degree of flexibility in how to deal with things, and it grants the kids a greater degree of freedom and education in both what weak security looks like and how cracking security just because it's weak might not be the best idea.
I am not entirely sure how to approach this. On the one hand, I am unsympathetic to parents who might want the kind of control that prevents children from accessing information about sexuality, for example. On the other, I really don’t want my kids to have unfettered access to social media and YouTube entirely without my knowledge. Suggestions on this are welcome.
I use a combination of DNS via https://1.1.1.1/ and WiFi/DHCP via https://eero.com/.
Works great.
Yes. This should be way easier.
Ask me how I know
I think that's probably a win for most parents.
A lot of kids learned about hacking (the good and the bad kind) this way.
I am lucky that my children accept the limits I impose on them. I think because they are not stupid and they sense that they need limits. It's not a struggle to take the hardware away. I even apologize to them when it's time to let the laptop go.
I don’t want him going down YouTube rabbit holes, developing a body image complex via Instagram, etc., at any time of day. It just seems strange to me that there’s this gaping hole in my parental oversight that was put there by our educational system.
In truth as someone with autism and ADHD I found myself down some pretty nasty rabbit holes if I wasn't at least given some guidance.
My kids cleared the watch history then I would notice the history was empty so I’d talk to them about it.
Then the started clearing and then leaving playlists of “educational” stuff running over night to poison the history.
Kids are smart.
I haven’t found a real solution yet other than banning YouTube on everything but the tv in the family room.
It’s funny because classes assign YouTube videos and the kids have to sit there and watch ads before their assignment.
I'd raise the issue among the PTA -- it seems like something that if enough people get involved on you might get a workable solution figured out. Hope the other stuff helps though.
This is no longer so easy after your kid realizes they can simply wait until you fall asleep, then sneak into your room and filch the machine from wherever you've stashed it.
And before anyone says "DatS sUrVeIlAnCe!", sod off: Parents have a duty to surveil their kids and discipline their behaviour properly, it's a part of raising a kid.
Call me a bad father, but it's working. When it takes a looong time to download a shitty Roblox game, he starts doing other projects. It's like magic.
Re: shit togetherness and batteries, a great (maybe too great) solution is a dimmable headlamp with rechargeable batteries which charge from a USB port or something similar. They tend to get excellent life on a charge, and being able to dim them is nice so you don't have the flood light on white pages effect before they're going to sleep.
All of my kids have one and I've never needed to swap batteries or remind them to charge them. They take them camping, too. They're a great thing to have handy.
I ended up collecting toys that glow in the dark, I would recharge them until 10 next to the light, and managed to read with them for a few minutes more (not much longer I guess). Under white bedsheets I would have enough light to be able to labouriously read sufficiently large-printed letters.
I guess my point is just that some kids absolutely do need some limits even for reading and other "good" activities, and they will use any means they can find to work around the limits you give them.
As parents, we should be able to determine what our kids have access to based on our own family values. No two families will be the same.
The idea that elementary or middle school children can handle having unrestricted (or minimally restricted) devices is absurd.
Could we not invent a religion, say Reformed Mennonites, that objects to children using screen devices? How could they argue with that?
As in, completely?
Then those parents should realise that they're severely hampering their kid's education and development in a screen-focused world, and set more reasonable restrictions.
I think there’s some value in having a modern, atheist, philosophical church to yield positive bureaucratic results. It reminds me of the early internet’s Church of the Subgenius [0] and people playing around for lulz. I had friends who were ironically Satanists and still have some who claim to be Discordians, but I think that’s just to mess with census takers.
Why is the school issuing anything to students? It should be your prerogative to outfit your child with whatever they need. School can ask for minimums (a pen, a notebook, certain textbooks, etc.) but they should not be issuing anything themselves.
I just wish schools were smarter.
I think iPads are probably the most durable, but they probably need a specialized teaching device like a new version of OLPC.
Yes, there are useful videos, and that’s why it’s not hard blocked.
But the lure and attention tuning of Minecraft videos, other gaming vids, and whatever else is at the top of the list now is just too strong.
(Btw, assume for these purposes that restrictions at some level are necessary, and that any response with “just” in it probably has been considered and doesn’t work)
It doesn't stop them from playing a local game, but the removal of the internet seems to break most of the desire to use devices inappropriately.
Aside from teaching kids to be slaves to sysadmins and kind of crushing the coolest part of computers, they were basically making kids take care of these expensive bricks. And that’s a lot of work for an 8 year old.
I think it’s more due to stupidity than any agenda, but still not something I want to be involved with.
I bought cheap refurbed macbookairs that sync to screen time controls with other devices, have pretty decent privacy controls, I have root school doesn’t, they can message me and other family members, and the battery lasts two days. The school didn’t like it, but I had to make a stink and said either this or do special paper assignments. My kids were embarrassed but now appreciate just putting their laptop into their backpack instead of laptop plus charger and charging it all day.
The school still issues their laptops some days for exams that will only run on their equipment. Whatever that means.
In lieu of that, setting up rules on your router or firewall to disallow all network access to their IP addresses after bed time. Better yet, to all addresses not on a white list.
Might occasionally be a pain for overnight updates though.
The common answer that kids need to be able to us information technology as a way to prepare them for challenges of their later life is laughable: most kids are already way more tech-savvy when they enter grade 4 or so than most teachers.
All I see is teachers unfit to use the medium effectively, and technical problems that prevent efficient use (wifi to restricted or too open, projector connection not working, incompatibilities between devices, etc.).
To me, this seems to be fad-like activism on the side of some politicians trying to make their mark without any real plan. Oh, well, I guess that way it's like the rest of the educational system...
Not everything is on the chromebook, though; lots is still from books and paper. I think a mix is a good approach. Of course the school does first need to ensure that the tech works seamlessly. That doesn't seem to be the case in your school.
There are some exceptions of course, as they always were, but what the tv was for older generations, computers and phones are for the new generations... just enough technical knowledge needed to see the content and not a bit more.
OTOH, the best would be if the teacher was delivering 1:1 tailored instruction based on student need, but that’s not happening, so at least the computer can teach him something.
At my kids' school the tech is used mostly like I described, and it really does help to give a bit of needed challenge to them.
What about those who aren't? Public education is designed to pull those struggling to average level, not leave them behind.
my sons teacher made him class monitor, that means he had to report if other kids broke rules. i found that somewhat strange to have such a role, but the teacher said that it would stop my son from trying to break rules, because he would have to report himself.
Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.
We were also the kids who were the most into computers at the time, and eventually the teacher realised that if they were on our side, they could use us to help teach the other kids basic computer skills (office, etc), by using games as the incentive.
If you can't beat them, have them join you...
Edit: We have reached max depth it seems, so I will just update stating that I suppose the change in the scene is quite drastic. Back when I was in school, maybe 5% of the class were computer literate. I felt like a god in that place, being able to help the "smart" students do basic things like creating an email address.
The fact that the teacher doesn't see this as an opportunity is what surprises me. If the work is so boring that kids would rather play games, then use gamification to exploit this behaviour.
In a little Aussie country town, getting computers linked together was a huge boon to our gaming horizons.
Under these premises, teachers in standardized environments are already in an impossible situation.
So we made a Javascript one-liner that would retrieve and fill in the answers.
The first edition also submitted them but the teacher could see how fast you completed a test so we removed that as students who normally could not pass the test suddenly had 100% and in 5 seconds of time.
In the end, manually removing, answering some answers wrong and waiting to submit made that class a breeze.
Too bad my French is now very bad but that wasn't something youth-me thought of at the time.
I still clearly remember the day I was showing one of the other interns an application I wrote in visual basic. I was quite proud of it since I was fairly new to programming at the time, and I had been working on mastering GDI. If you know what GDI is, you can probably guess where this is going. It was what game devs call a "map editor", where you could take a palette of images and place them around in a grid to author scenes. This was during our lunch break.
One of the supervisors walked over, saw something "game-like" on the screen, and angrily unplugged the PC at the back. (Good thing I didn't have any important files open.) Once I explained what it was he wasn't angry anymore, but he didn't apologize.
So I guess "no fun allowed, even if you're learning" is a pretty old mantra everywhere.
Also, if one is not concerned about being cool enough to run the real Minecraft Java edition, Minetest is a similar game that has been ported to web browsers, and it runs a lot better than eaglercraft.
Mojang has also developed a clone of Minecraft Classic for HTML5, it supports invite-only multiplayer, but unfortunately for old players the lack of mass-multiplayer public servers has taken away most of the charm from Minecraft Classic, which is a surprisingly boring game without multiplayer (lava survival and classic capture the flag were some seriously fun custom game modes that we don't have anymore in the Minecraft ecosystem)
---
Eaglercraft: Google it yourself, not linking because of copyright
Minetest for the web: https://minetest.dustlabs.io/
Minecraft Classic HTML5: https://classic.minecraft.net/
The teachers rarely had any extra work to assign me so they pretty much gave me carte blanche to use my time however I wanted as long as it was on the computer.
Great memories of trying to skirt school "blockers" in order to get to gaming websites in high school (this would have been in the early 00s). Glad to see this spirit is still alive and well and probably even moreso now than ever.
(Hint: i learned they kept the "bypass" code in clear text in the registry, and later simply killed the processes from a command prompt with a batch file).
I also had a small apache server and ftp box i would tunnel though or get executables from i wanted to play (like pinball, the monsters blocked pinball). Since it was the very early days of the internet my morning routine generally consisted of waiting for folks to leave, firing up the server and taking over the fax line for the day and getting the IP before heading off to school.
I used a scheduler (probably cron, i dont remember) to bring it all down around 3pm before my parents got home.
I was grounded for that as well. But it was also near/around the time that broadband/docsis was rolling out so they moved to it at some point soon after.
My tech inept dad was what got me into tech honestly. He had a nack for turning off the computer by just holding the power button back in the windows 95 days. Eventually he corrupted the thing, blamed me and forced me to "fix" it with gateway support. I ended up searching up how to install an OS at the school lab, and just re-installed windows for him and stopped using a computer at home until i could get my own.
Hell I even made a counter-strike map of the campus and surrounding suburban downtown where the terrorists bomb the school's proxy server so the students can have unrestricted internet!
Man that would have gone over so well nowadays...
edit: or the time I got around their EXE blocking by changing a bunch of strings in UnrealTournament.exe to look like Norton Anti-virus. Got a couple weeks' suspension for that!
The network admin (a friend of mine) told me he gauged his skill as an admin by how quickly I was able to break past whatever blocks he had in place.
OMG That's awesome!
EDIT: One teacher even had an Apple II with "Touch the Target"
Really makes me feel old thinking about it now-- it wasn't really THAT long ago but then again I guess it was.
Of course you don't have access to run ResEdit, so your bring your own copy of that on a flash drive with its creator code already fixed.
"RASM" was my go-to. That was the remote access status monitor, and any user account had access to it.
For the less technically inclined, you could create a custom "Launch Application" toolbar button in Apple Works (or Claris Works before that). It would give you an error that you don't have permission to launch the application, and then it would open anyway.
Kids these days! Happy to consume content endlessly. It has to mean something.
{ Old man shakes his cane at young people. }
I get that you're trying to make a self aware joke about your comment with the old man shaking his cane. But this comment really is completely out of touch with reality.
Honestly I think it's a bit sad that schools are so dependent on Chromebooks. I didn't have a Chromebook at school when I went. I think I'd learn worse on a Chromebook than a teacher.
We installed the halo free trial on our school computers and played blood gulch CTF in the computer lab all the time. It was awesome.
Miniclip was huge on these Sun Microsystems machines we had.
Good times.
I still went to University and got a Physics degree.
I think the most important thing is that the kids feel that the class is important, I felt computing class (which was basically Microsoft Office class) was a waste of time, so I just played games. But I understood that I had to study a good degree to get a good job. So in Maths, Science etc. I paid complete attention.
The difference is that was restricted to just computer lab. Now kids have computers on their desks during many more classes. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect they can stay focused.
I decided to play a SNES emulator in my spare time, on a USB stick. I had to sit towards the back. But the machines were locked down and I couldn't run any plain old .exe I had on a stick. But XP had a zip file view, and I could launch the exe from there. The last thing I needed to do was preconfigure saves and the controls to point at the correct thumb drive letter since it was different at home than it was at school.
Now I've moved on the real world, but that time of mindset sticks with me. That software doesn't do what you want in an automated way? Surely there's a way to do that. Autowiring JSPs in a mixed Spring/JSP legacy java app, writing custom jenkins plugins, a custom code coverage library to performantly calculate code coverage against minified JS, etc.
No class or degree could have taught me as much or been as valuable for my career.
Educators shouldn’t try too har to win this arms race. Losing is also winning.
It strikes me as strange that the schools are playing a cat-and-mouse game rather than simply disciplining the students caught playing games or accessing these sites. Loss of privileges or so forth for violators would serve as an actual deterrent rather than encouraging students to simply find new ways to get around the block.
Sure kids would find ways to do something else or play the same way they use collaborative editing to chat but I don't even understand the purpose of letting them browse the whole internet during a class.
There were kids leaving trash out after lunch, and one of the staff had the worst offenders pick up trash before leaving the lunch room. This practice was banned because it was "degrading."
That's just the most recent story, there are dozens others like it.
More on topic, we got a letter from the teacher that my son was playing games. I said "why not just take the Chromebook away when that happens?"
The response: oh we can't do that.
...can't we fund some amazing games that are... educational?
And not as some clunky add-on to the side of a game...
...but like, reasonably a part of the game.
Imagine working/studying at a place that mandates that setting.
Imagine working at Google and being asked by your product manager to implement that.
Imagine actually doing it instead of just quitting.
I’d share flash drives loaded with halo combat evolved trial, Warcraft III, and a plethora of MAME games and that incentivized other students who wanted to play with me.
It could be a learning tool if expectations are set right. But yeah it did lead to some kids trying to just play games all period too and would have to later fail the class and do summer packets. But it sure did lead to results for the majority.
Several million dollars in annual profit? That's a pretty decent haul, considering the size of the team!
You could turn up to school with a powerpoint full of flash games and play them full screen on any computer. Impossible to block because there’s no web traffic.
The drive for technology in the classroom is for the benefit of manufacturers, not children.
However the "Zoom classrooms" during Coronavirus have probably now made it difficult to go back.
Good times.