> Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.

I would not fault computers here. At my school time, when pupils were bored, they covertly played card games like Skat [a German card game] or graph paper games like Battleship, Racetrack, Connect Four, ... under the school desks.

I still remember this one girl who, when the teacher confiscated one deck of Skat cards, the moment that the teacher looked away, simply took out another deck from her school bag, and play continued (she played Skat semi-competitively, so she nearly always had, I think, dozens of decks of Skat cards in her school bag).

Another former friend had an insane creativity in turning stuff that one could find in a pencil case into contraptions for shooting rubber pieces.

Technology changes over time, humans don't.