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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

I've been teaching my nephew how to code using Scratch. He told me that they blocked Scratch at school because some of the kids were using it to play games during school. Kind of a shame, because it is a great way for kids to learn how to code.

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Back when I was 14 I interned at the local department of transportation office doing IT, which at the time meant creating filemaker databases, scanning and manually entering lots of forms, carting massive CRTs and desktops around, and deleting viruses from civil engineers' computers.

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.

Similarly, my attempt to get my son started on simple HTML was stranded by his school disabling the "developer view" in Chrome. I suspect the simple reason is that seeing the source allowed you to cheat on some of the educational websites the teachers use for assignments.

We had something like this but for French. The website was used for real tests and assignments but the answers would be loaded somewhere even if the test/assignment would not show you if you got it wrong.

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.

Had the IT apprentice at my office disable dev tools on Chrome. They didn't realise that we, as web developers, used them.

"The culture of no" demands obedience and forbids anything remotely fun.

Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.

C'mon ... the reality is that teachers need the kids to concentrate and given a choice between doing work and playing games, the games are likely to win. Teachers are being put in an impossible situation.

I have quite a number of fond memories of how we hid pokemon blue and gameboy emulators on every machine in our school's computer lab (from around 1999-2003).

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.

I don’t see how that applies here. It’s not just a handful of kids that are most into computers that would rather use their devices to play games at school than do school work.

Same era and outcome from our computer shenanigans. We ended up being enlisted to set up new computer labs etc. We even got some of the old network hardware "gifted" to us, which eventually let us run lan parties.

In a little Aussie country town, getting computers linked together was a huge boon to our gaming horizons.

I think the premise here is that curiosity is the source of learning. Without it, students are just going through the motions. Learning becomes a form of drudgery. Cleverness emerges as method of solving the meta-problem of institutionalism. Švejk-like behavior becomes the norm where passionate learning could have been cultivated.

Under these premises, teachers in standardized environments are already in an impossible situation.

Well kids don’t tend to be great at thinking about long term consequences or moderating their time spent having fun, so how would you have the lazy pencil pushers handle the problem of kids being distracted by games at school?

Using Scratch to create programs is one of those cases where a kid can learn and have fun at the same time. Sounds like the best possible sort of activity to encourage at school. So what if the programs are games?

Absolutely, creating games is a great learning activity for school. But, if it was blocked, I’m guessing the issue is that most of the kids were just using it as another gaming website—just playing games that had been created by others. But I’ll admit, I only have a general familiarity with Scratch. Perhaps the scenario I’m describing doesn’t make sense/isn’t how Scratch works?

god forbid anyone actually learns something at school

The ability to play games is what makes it so good. It provides an incentive to learn the tool, and then an incentive to try to alter the games written in it.

Scratch is great - such an excellent introduction to coding.

Try Snap as well. It's like Scratch and has the same learning curve, but has more features (functions, 2D arrays, hashmaps, local variables, recursion, string manipulation, etc.) that make it more suitable than Scratch for more advanced computer science concepts if the student wants to speed ahead. It could be used all the way from elementary school through high school without running into serious limitations, if an instructor wanted to.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/help/SnapManual.pdf

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