it's a war between kids, teachers, and the developers
April 27, 2023 6:31 AM Subscribe
Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops [Waypoint][Games by Vice] “Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old. What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games. [...] There’s a whole not-so-underground market for getting around software like GoGuardian, like the YouTube channel IrwinTech, where it’s kids explaining to other kids what to do.”
May the memory of my trig teacher, who winked and gave me extra credit for writing a BASIC D&D game on a VT100 terminal instead of listening, be a blessing.
posted by johngoren at 6:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [32 favorites]
posted by johngoren at 6:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [32 favorites]
I remember watching The Screen Savers back in the day, they had a tip on how to run the Windows defrag utility more effectively by opening the system.ini file and changing the shell from explorer.exe to defrag.exe or whatever the executable is called. Basically this means when you boot windows, instead of getting your familiar user interface you'd ONLY be able to run the defrag utility. I realized one could probably change this to any executable. I think it was maybe 8th grade when I had a lengthy period in the computer lab. Our computers all ran some Novell client which didn't let you open anything except for a browser, Office 97 and probably some other basic programs. I had figured out one could do something wonky with the Word 97 "Help" dialogue and open the System Info utility and then open the "Run" dialogue OR SOMETHING, memory is hazy. I was able to open notepad, open the system.ini file and change the system shell to SOL.EXE, also known as Solitaire. When the computer was rebooted, it would launch Solitaire and nothing else. Solitaire was the only thing you could run after logging in without someone undoing what I had done, which nobody, including the poor school IT person, knew how to undo. I think I ended up doing this to several computers in that lab. Nobody ever figured out it was me.
posted by sewellcm at 6:59 AM on April 27, 2023 [54 favorites]
posted by sewellcm at 6:59 AM on April 27, 2023 [54 favorites]
Looks like peacefire.org is still up.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:02 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:02 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I recall taking a keyboard typography course in my freshman year of high school. I would usually finish the assignments early and then just dick around in the OS where I discovered someone had installed some games. I found a disk and soon the whole class was playing tetris. The teacher sent me to the VP's office b/c according to her: "I had hacked into the computer." Thankfully my VP just rolled his eyes and said to uninstall the games.
posted by Fizz at 7:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 7:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
The obvious answer is make learning more like a game.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:17 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:17 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
The obvious answer is make learning more like a game.
*ahem*
posted by Fizz at 7:24 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
*ahem*
posted by Fizz at 7:24 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
Rewriting the classic Basic Ski game for the TI-85 to add hostile NPC skiers was a fun way to pass the time during study hall, and more useful for my career than 90% of whatever I was supposed to be doing throughout high school or college.
I’m still super impressed with the kid at my school who managed to write a very, very primitive 3D game similar to X-wing in absolutely *insanely* optimized ASM on the TI-85, with some crazy polygon rasterization that should not have been remotely possible at 30fps on the Z80 processor. Unfortunately our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time / completely-fucked-up-in-retrospect I can think of) and none of us ever saw him again shortly after he got it working. I still wish I’d gotten the chance to go in depth with him on the rendering algorithm. I mostly recall it being one of those hacks that was incredibly implementation-specific but looked like fucking witchcraft in-context.
At any rate, writing programs that automated a very lengthy process of hiding copies of Doom from my evangelical parents amongst the Windows 3.1 system files with plausible filenames is what motivated me to really get serious about programming in the first place. And ask them to sign me up for a C programming course at the local community college while still a sophomore in high school. Which lead to a paid internship on Danielle Bunten’s last project, writing RTS map editor code using DirectX 3 at 16… so this is just the continuation of a pipeline to games industry jobs that’s been going on for probably close to forty years, now. Still one of the absolute best ways to learn practical programming skills and really just self-teaching in general that you could possibly ask for.
Best of luck to the next generation in the Eternal War on educator tyranny.
posted by Ryvar at 7:30 AM on April 27, 2023 [34 favorites]
I’m still super impressed with the kid at my school who managed to write a very, very primitive 3D game similar to X-wing in absolutely *insanely* optimized ASM on the TI-85, with some crazy polygon rasterization that should not have been remotely possible at 30fps on the Z80 processor. Unfortunately our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time / completely-fucked-up-in-retrospect I can think of) and none of us ever saw him again shortly after he got it working. I still wish I’d gotten the chance to go in depth with him on the rendering algorithm. I mostly recall it being one of those hacks that was incredibly implementation-specific but looked like fucking witchcraft in-context.
At any rate, writing programs that automated a very lengthy process of hiding copies of Doom from my evangelical parents amongst the Windows 3.1 system files with plausible filenames is what motivated me to really get serious about programming in the first place. And ask them to sign me up for a C programming course at the local community college while still a sophomore in high school. Which lead to a paid internship on Danielle Bunten’s last project, writing RTS map editor code using DirectX 3 at 16… so this is just the continuation of a pipeline to games industry jobs that’s been going on for probably close to forty years, now. Still one of the absolute best ways to learn practical programming skills and really just self-teaching in general that you could possibly ask for.
Best of luck to the next generation in the Eternal War on educator tyranny.
posted by Ryvar at 7:30 AM on April 27, 2023 [34 favorites]
Google blew it here by not marketing Stadia to younger kids.
I mean, the kids all have Chromebooks and because teachers are using Google Classroom and YouTube for lessons, IT departments can't blacklist Google's domains. (As a parent during COVID+remote learning this became annoyingly obvious). It would have been a slam dunk!
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:32 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
I mean, the kids all have Chromebooks and because teachers are using Google Classroom and YouTube for lessons, IT departments can't blacklist Google's domains. (As a parent during COVID+remote learning this became annoyingly obvious). It would have been a slam dunk!
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:32 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
There were lots of learning video games (though not that particularly all that much fun) on my kids chromebooks from 1st grade and beyond.
The problem with them all is that they are made by professors trying to walk the line between not dumbing down for the very smartest students while not being too simple for the normal/undeveloped end, and they all lean towards the smartest end because that's who they prefer. Same as all homework, same as all tests. Therefore they are way above level/not that much fun for like 60% of the student population.
So students play Steve the Dinosaur instead
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on April 27, 2023
The problem with them all is that they are made by professors trying to walk the line between not dumbing down for the very smartest students while not being too simple for the normal/undeveloped end, and they all lean towards the smartest end because that's who they prefer. Same as all homework, same as all tests. Therefore they are way above level/not that much fun for like 60% of the student population.
So students play Steve the Dinosaur instead
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on April 27, 2023
This is what will get the average child computer literate, and some of them into software development, far more than well-meaning things like CoderDojo.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
Hell, I'd love to see a Minecraft or Super Mario Maker 2 module/course for students of a variety of ages. That's the type of stuff that tickles certain kids brains. But most of our educator leaders seem more inclined to have kids focus on standardized tests so that they can maintain school investments/funding.
posted by Fizz at 7:59 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 7:59 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I had figured out one could do something wonky with the Word 97 "Help" dialogue and open the System Info utility and then open the "Run" dialogue OR SOMETHING, memory is hazy.
I had to dig a bit to find it, but you're thinking of a variation of this classic workaround that many of us definitely enjoyed taking advantage of for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons back in the day.
posted by mhoye at 8:00 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I had to dig a bit to find it, but you're thinking of a variation of this classic workaround that many of us definitely enjoyed taking advantage of for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons back in the day.
posted by mhoye at 8:00 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Hell, I'd love to see a Minecraft or Super Mario Maker 2 module/course for students of a variety of ages.
Yeah, this is the way. Don't start with code, start with play. Show somebody how to make a half-adder and then full-adder in Mario Maker. Don't teach assembler, teach redcode. Put the things that are hard because nobody has made them easy away, and teach the same lessons with tools people have polished because the polish matters.
posted by mhoye at 8:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah, this is the way. Don't start with code, start with play. Show somebody how to make a half-adder and then full-adder in Mario Maker. Don't teach assembler, teach redcode. Put the things that are hard because nobody has made them easy away, and teach the same lessons with tools people have polished because the polish matters.
posted by mhoye at 8:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Though everyone (me included) loves to tell the gleeful stories about getting official equipment to serve their unofficial purposes, percentage-wise, my students were a hundred times more likely to just catastrophically break their devices than to hack them.
I enjoyed having the things there, mind you, but teaching with devices requires more involvement from the teachers, not less.
Also, gamification has its educational limits, speaking as someone who got obsessed with Duolingo's competitive leaderboards recently to the point that I had to take my account private because I was whizzing through lessons without actually listening to them. I was learning, all right--learning how to game the game so I could get to the top of the boards, but not learning a whole lot of the language I was supposed to be studying. Again, careful design and monitoring is essential. People keep trying to take human moderation out of the equation, bless them.
posted by Peach at 8:15 AM on April 27, 2023 [20 favorites]
I enjoyed having the things there, mind you, but teaching with devices requires more involvement from the teachers, not less.
Also, gamification has its educational limits, speaking as someone who got obsessed with Duolingo's competitive leaderboards recently to the point that I had to take my account private because I was whizzing through lessons without actually listening to them. I was learning, all right--learning how to game the game so I could get to the top of the boards, but not learning a whole lot of the language I was supposed to be studying. Again, careful design and monitoring is essential. People keep trying to take human moderation out of the equation, bless them.
posted by Peach at 8:15 AM on April 27, 2023 [20 favorites]
I used to work on Chrome OS policy server and we had to create a setting to turn off the Chrome offline dinosaur game because entire classes of kids would get obsessed with it. This was probably ten years ago, I can only imagine how sophisticated all the actors in this particular farce have gotten in the intervening time.
posted by potrzebie at 8:16 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by potrzebie at 8:16 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Don't start with code, start with play.
For me, growing up with a C64, code was play. I could type a few lines of BASIC in and suddenly I had a strobe light! It was awesome, a perfect laboratory with which to experiment at my own pace. And, incidentally, I avoided all of the computer classes in high school since I didn't want an adult telling me what to do. Computers were, for me, a form of rebellion, a space where I had autonomy and expertise that the adults in my life lacked.
These days, I'd probably just go to CodePen or futz with the dev console in Chrome.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:17 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
For me, growing up with a C64, code was play. I could type a few lines of BASIC in and suddenly I had a strobe light! It was awesome, a perfect laboratory with which to experiment at my own pace. And, incidentally, I avoided all of the computer classes in high school since I didn't want an adult telling me what to do. Computers were, for me, a form of rebellion, a space where I had autonomy and expertise that the adults in my life lacked.
These days, I'd probably just go to CodePen or futz with the dev console in Chrome.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:17 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Don't teach assembler
Or just make them basically aware of assembly and its role, and let them self-sort. The ones who should be learning it at that age will naturally drift towards it (which is what happened in my high school), and the ones who would be harmed by working in it will rapidly move on to higher-level languages. At 14 & 15 I split my time adding gameplay features to existing games in BASIC and coding in C… 28 years later I split my time building gameplay systems in Unreal’s visual programming language, and coding support functions for said in C++.
Self-motivation and self-teaching is the most important factor for people in a field that is perpetually rapidly changing, so I think the best thing you can do is let them know what’s out there and then step back while they figure out who they are and what motivates them. Being on the receiving end of that means I wake up every morning of my adult life excited to go to work and that’s something I think everybody should have, or at least get the opportunity to have.
posted by Ryvar at 8:20 AM on April 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
Or just make them basically aware of assembly and its role, and let them self-sort. The ones who should be learning it at that age will naturally drift towards it (which is what happened in my high school), and the ones who would be harmed by working in it will rapidly move on to higher-level languages. At 14 & 15 I split my time adding gameplay features to existing games in BASIC and coding in C… 28 years later I split my time building gameplay systems in Unreal’s visual programming language, and coding support functions for said in C++.
Self-motivation and self-teaching is the most important factor for people in a field that is perpetually rapidly changing, so I think the best thing you can do is let them know what’s out there and then step back while they figure out who they are and what motivates them. Being on the receiving end of that means I wake up every morning of my adult life excited to go to work and that’s something I think everybody should have, or at least get the opportunity to have.
posted by Ryvar at 8:20 AM on April 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
Let the eternal struggle play out!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:27 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:27 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
Oh jeez. Off topic, but, on a bus field trip to Kentucky, we had nothing except homework and TI83s.
I programmed something a bit like flappy bird, and every other kid on the bus copied it onto their calculator line by line and we played that for a week.
I was a hero.
posted by constraint at 8:27 AM on April 27, 2023 [20 favorites]
I programmed something a bit like flappy bird, and every other kid on the bus copied it onto their calculator line by line and we played that for a week.
I was a hero.
posted by constraint at 8:27 AM on April 27, 2023 [20 favorites]
The theoretical, applied, practical (and impractical) uses of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) games has been a part of my research for a long while now. It's enduringly fun, especially with the constant flow of new games and platforms. Games which 'accidentally' teach (and are used to teach) across several subject domains, such as RollerCoaster Tycoon being used to teach basic physics, economics, math, and design, are a personal favourite.
Recently I've shifted to a narrower focus on how glaciers, and sea level changes, are represented in digital games and environments, so I'm on a structured (and steep) learning curve in this subject domain. One example is the 'Gathering Storm' expansion pack for Civilization VI. Over on Reddit, one player has vented their frustration (and lack of enjoyment) as sea level rises seems unavoidable and flood barriers unattainable, resulting in an interesting thread of relevance to learning about climate change through playing games.
posted by Wordshore at 8:31 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
Recently I've shifted to a narrower focus on how glaciers, and sea level changes, are represented in digital games and environments, so I'm on a structured (and steep) learning curve in this subject domain. One example is the 'Gathering Storm' expansion pack for Civilization VI. Over on Reddit, one player has vented their frustration (and lack of enjoyment) as sea level rises seems unavoidable and flood barriers unattainable, resulting in an interesting thread of relevance to learning about climate change through playing games.
posted by Wordshore at 8:31 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
In high school, we had games stashed away all over the various computers in the school. The typing lab had Heroes of Might and Magic, the science lab Macs all had SimCity 2000. But then one day we realized we could probably use the library computers to host networked DOOM games.
Now, since we were fine upstanding citizens, we asked the librarian if we could do this (after school, of course). She was totally on board. She thought it was great we were learning how to do all these technical things on our own volition.
We had some good times in those afterschool matches... right up until one of the Vice Principals found out about it. He was not as impressed with our technical knowhow.
posted by Zargon X at 8:40 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
Now, since we were fine upstanding citizens, we asked the librarian if we could do this (after school, of course). She was totally on board. She thought it was great we were learning how to do all these technical things on our own volition.
We had some good times in those afterschool matches... right up until one of the Vice Principals found out about it. He was not as impressed with our technical knowhow.
posted by Zargon X at 8:40 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
The best school computer lab policy I've ever encountered was at a community college in the early 2000s. All the machines restored themselves from an image on boot. Logging out automatically rebooted the computer. Between those two events, the machine was pretty much your own and you could more or less do whatever you wanted. The admins were either incredibly permissive or incredibly naive about how much their system protected them. Either way it was bliss.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:41 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:41 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Awwww, bless.
I have a relative whose job includes trying to thwart this kind of behavior at her school. I hope she doesn't try too hard.
posted by praemunire at 8:46 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I have a relative whose job includes trying to thwart this kind of behavior at her school. I hope she doesn't try too hard.
posted by praemunire at 8:46 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Once I figured out I could use clothespins to fasten punch cards to my bike frame to make motorcycle noises and cut up the scratch tapes to make really cool streamers for my handlebar grips, my productivity went way down.
posted by skyscraper at 8:54 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by skyscraper at 8:54 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
I was a hero.
I was in school at the time when being having anything to do with computers automatically made you an irrevocable social outcast, but then, I was fat, smart, introverted and wore glasses so I never had a chance.
At some point a second cousin that I'd never heard of had died, and when invited to pick over some of his random junk, I snagged a pocket computer that was basically a fancy calculator with BASIC. I brought it to school and some kid borrowed it to attempt to write "I HATE FUCKING COMPUTERS" on it. But it didn't allow lines of text that long, so all he managed was "I HATE FUCKING"
For once I had a laugh at someone else's expense.
posted by Foosnark at 8:58 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
I was in school at the time when being having anything to do with computers automatically made you an irrevocable social outcast, but then, I was fat, smart, introverted and wore glasses so I never had a chance.
At some point a second cousin that I'd never heard of had died, and when invited to pick over some of his random junk, I snagged a pocket computer that was basically a fancy calculator with BASIC. I brought it to school and some kid borrowed it to attempt to write "I HATE FUCKING COMPUTERS" on it. But it didn't allow lines of text that long, so all he managed was "I HATE FUCKING"
For once I had a laugh at someone else's expense.
posted by Foosnark at 8:58 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
gamification has its educational limits, speaking as someone who got obsessed with Duolingo's competitive leaderboards recently to the point that I had to take my account private because I was whizzing through lessons without actually listening to them. I was learning, all right--learning how to game the game so I could get to the top of the boards, but not learning a whole lot of the language I was supposed to be studying.
Oh, yeah. I like friending people and having that mutual reinforcement and support, but I don't give a fuck whether I'm "amethyst" or "onyx" or whatthefuckever.
Unfortunately our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time / completely-fucked-up-in-retrospect I can think of) and none of us ever saw him again shortly after he got it working.
Wait, what? Was the affair found out and they transferred to another school or something out of shame?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:04 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Oh, yeah. I like friending people and having that mutual reinforcement and support, but I don't give a fuck whether I'm "amethyst" or "onyx" or whatthefuckever.
Unfortunately our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time / completely-fucked-up-in-retrospect I can think of) and none of us ever saw him again shortly after he got it working.
Wait, what? Was the affair found out and they transferred to another school or something out of shame?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:04 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
The kid in question was transferred elsewhere, (presumably at his parents’ request), the teacher… no idea but it was all kept super quiet. Might’ve transferred, might have gone back to Germany. Suddenly had a substitute one morning shortly after the trip and for the rest of the year, a couple of kids who’d been the ones to find out let the rest of us know the score.
She used to catch me as I was leaving pretty regularly and give me rides home in her car since I was “on her way” … which in retrospect may have meant “on her list.” In either case it was all deeply fucked up but I will admit she is still the first image that flashes in my mind’s eye when I hear the words “pantyhose” or “nylons,” so there’s that.
posted by Ryvar at 9:16 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
She used to catch me as I was leaving pretty regularly and give me rides home in her car since I was “on her way” … which in retrospect may have meant “on her list.” In either case it was all deeply fucked up but I will admit she is still the first image that flashes in my mind’s eye when I hear the words “pantyhose” or “nylons,” so there’s that.
posted by Ryvar at 9:16 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
There’s a whole not-so-underground market for getting around software like GoGuardian, like the YouTube channel IrwinTech,
in case you didn't pursue the links, Irwin's offering not just three or four but thirty-eight "school device unlocking and hacks" strategies (one of which is currently unavailable). He's a very bad boy and I want him on the pay roll immediately.
posted by philip-random at 9:22 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
in case you didn't pursue the links, Irwin's offering not just three or four but thirty-eight "school device unlocking and hacks" strategies (one of which is currently unavailable). He's a very bad boy and I want him on the pay roll immediately.
posted by philip-random at 9:22 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
My Computer Science class in high school 20 something years ago mostly consisted of us playing Quake. The teacher was a drunk and didn't really care about what we did as long as we were quiet. So I learned pretty much nothing. I did not do well on that AP test...
posted by downtohisturtles at 9:34 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by downtohisturtles at 9:34 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Could be worse, your kid and her friends could basically treat you as an "offshore" software consulting firm from her 6th grade technology design class. Leave it to a bunch of private school kids to exploit their teacher's rule of "you can utilize any resource on their internet, as long as it's free and is not a LLM" by figuring out a WhatsApp group that includes some of their software engineer parents. At least they are getting some sweet games out of it.
Her school is Bring Your Own Device, with most kids bringing Apple MacBook Airs, but anything with a keyboard will do. Even if there was a want to push down policies to restrict behavior, there wouldn't be a way to effectively do it given the mix of devices. There is absolutely no connection between the device and the school beyond basic monitoring of the network traffic, so the school doesn't even bother trying to restrict anything on the devices themselves. All enforcement is "behavior based". Basically, if my daughter is fucking around and not paying attention, it really doesn't matter in what medium she is doing said fucking around. Playing games on her machine during class is exactly the same as zoning out, or reading a book, or talking to friends, etc.
Which, honestly is the correct way to do this. The second you try to enforce any rules on what specific behavior is banned, the kids immediately find workarounds. But, if instead you focus on what behavior is required, the kids make that happen and mostly don't even bother with the "bad" stuff, since the finding the workarounds was 90% of the fun anyway.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
Her school is Bring Your Own Device, with most kids bringing Apple MacBook Airs, but anything with a keyboard will do. Even if there was a want to push down policies to restrict behavior, there wouldn't be a way to effectively do it given the mix of devices. There is absolutely no connection between the device and the school beyond basic monitoring of the network traffic, so the school doesn't even bother trying to restrict anything on the devices themselves. All enforcement is "behavior based". Basically, if my daughter is fucking around and not paying attention, it really doesn't matter in what medium she is doing said fucking around. Playing games on her machine during class is exactly the same as zoning out, or reading a book, or talking to friends, etc.
Which, honestly is the correct way to do this. The second you try to enforce any rules on what specific behavior is banned, the kids immediately find workarounds. But, if instead you focus on what behavior is required, the kids make that happen and mostly don't even bother with the "bad" stuff, since the finding the workarounds was 90% of the fun anyway.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
I like that we're at that point where parent-aged people can read stories like this and fondly reflect on our own memories of playing Quake in the computer lab.
I'm not sure if edutainment (or "gamification" as it's now sometimes called) is the solution here. That's an approach that has been tried since the 70s, but as far as I can tell it's only been successful as a software marketing gimmick in every subject but computers. At a certain point someone has to tell the kid how to find the length of the hypotenuse, and then they have to practice it a few times and be evaluated on their understanding, and you can wrap that up with scores and progress bars and cartoony animations, but it's not going to be compelling like an actual video game unless students can get invested in the material itself.
posted by jy4m at 9:50 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure if edutainment (or "gamification" as it's now sometimes called) is the solution here. That's an approach that has been tried since the 70s, but as far as I can tell it's only been successful as a software marketing gimmick in every subject but computers. At a certain point someone has to tell the kid how to find the length of the hypotenuse, and then they have to practice it a few times and be evaluated on their understanding, and you can wrap that up with scores and progress bars and cartoony animations, but it's not going to be compelling like an actual video game unless students can get invested in the material itself.
posted by jy4m at 9:50 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
At the computer lab in my high-school, there was a sign saying "No Game Playing on the Paper Terminals!".
posted by octothorpe at 9:50 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 9:50 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
When I was in high school, if we wanted to play Tetris in the computer lab, we had to write it ourselves. In Turbo Pascal. Which we did.
posted by phooky at 10:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by phooky at 10:03 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Yeah, all we had was Oregon Trail and trying to kill off all the characters and buffalo for our own amusement.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:12 AM on April 27, 2023
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:12 AM on April 27, 2023
The only thing I do remember trying to do on school computers was using the library PCs to dial into my BBS. I feel like it worked once, and then we got banned.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:13 AM on April 27, 2023
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:13 AM on April 27, 2023
At some point a second cousin that I'd never heard of had died, and when invited to pick over some of his random junk, I snagged a pocket computer that was basically a fancy calculator with BASIC.
I can't help but wonder about that kid, Foosnark. To have such a thing at that time indicates that they were probably an awesome person.
posted by JHarris at 10:30 AM on April 27, 2023
I can't help but wonder about that kid, Foosnark. To have such a thing at that time indicates that they were probably an awesome person.
posted by JHarris at 10:30 AM on April 27, 2023
At a certain point someone has to tell the kid how to find the length of the hypotenuse, and then they have to practice it a few times and be evaluated
yes to all of this. But I have a friend who's been studying education theory (etc) for decades, and he's always quick to point out:
"What are children doing when they're playing? They're learning. It may not be stuff from a fixed curriculum that they can be tested/graded on. But they are most definitely learning all kinds of essential stuff that will serve them as they mature -- social, technical, philosophical etc. So please do not discourage play."
posted by philip-random at 10:32 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
yes to all of this. But I have a friend who's been studying education theory (etc) for decades, and he's always quick to point out:
"What are children doing when they're playing? They're learning. It may not be stuff from a fixed curriculum that they can be tested/graded on. But they are most definitely learning all kinds of essential stuff that will serve them as they mature -- social, technical, philosophical etc. So please do not discourage play."
posted by philip-random at 10:32 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
I would note that the most successful method for me to learn geometry and trig was trying to write a Wolf3D clone on my TI-82, unsuccessfully. I've been grateful for years to Mrs. Funk, when some kid snitched that I was writing TI-BASIC scripts to answer homework questions, and she responded in a thick NE accent "so what? He's getting the right answer and you're not."
posted by Four String Riot at 10:36 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Four String Riot at 10:36 AM on April 27, 2023 [7 favorites]
This is what will get the average child computer literate, and some of them into software development, far more than well-meaning things like CoderDojo.
I guess I'm the cranky mom in this thread. I support play. I'm relatively permissive at home with our technology stuff.
But I don't think that in the year of our lord 2023, playing Chromebook games is leading to computer literacy or coding (with some exceptions, both in terms of 'which games' and 'which kids.") My kids are smart and artsy, but they are not kids who gravitate towards code-your-own stuff. They have liked Minecraft but they don't like, naturally hack their game environments. Neither do their friends. Plus - these are Chromebooks. The Shell Shockers game that's listed in the article is sure, not like the worst thing but it's laden with ads and it's a first person shooter. I am betting the kids at my kids' schools know about it.
My younger child dreams of making millions on his vlog, so that's where he's getting inspiration - from the types of YouTubers referenced in the article.
The cat's out of the bag and we just have to pet it and trim its nails, but what I see is that since each child got issued a school Chromebook, the kids have trouble focusing because they continually distract themselves.
And yes, we all distracted ourselves - I had a whole extensive technique for hiding the James Blish Star Trek books in my other textbooks. But the difference is a) teachers are just giving up to an astonishing degree, fuelled by the pandemic and b) there is a huge difference between a book, and a game designed to keep you watching ads and playing.
Expert designers are paid to make games hard to leave. Is that what we want up against our math lessons? Even if the math lessons should be equally great, I'm just not sure it's realistic.
Anyways, my child does have a truly impressive level of mastery over Google Slides and how to quickly get your presentations done in them in both English and French, so there's that.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [27 favorites]
I guess I'm the cranky mom in this thread. I support play. I'm relatively permissive at home with our technology stuff.
But I don't think that in the year of our lord 2023, playing Chromebook games is leading to computer literacy or coding (with some exceptions, both in terms of 'which games' and 'which kids.") My kids are smart and artsy, but they are not kids who gravitate towards code-your-own stuff. They have liked Minecraft but they don't like, naturally hack their game environments. Neither do their friends. Plus - these are Chromebooks. The Shell Shockers game that's listed in the article is sure, not like the worst thing but it's laden with ads and it's a first person shooter. I am betting the kids at my kids' schools know about it.
My younger child dreams of making millions on his vlog, so that's where he's getting inspiration - from the types of YouTubers referenced in the article.
The cat's out of the bag and we just have to pet it and trim its nails, but what I see is that since each child got issued a school Chromebook, the kids have trouble focusing because they continually distract themselves.
And yes, we all distracted ourselves - I had a whole extensive technique for hiding the James Blish Star Trek books in my other textbooks. But the difference is a) teachers are just giving up to an astonishing degree, fuelled by the pandemic and b) there is a huge difference between a book, and a game designed to keep you watching ads and playing.
Expert designers are paid to make games hard to leave. Is that what we want up against our math lessons? Even if the math lessons should be equally great, I'm just not sure it's realistic.
Anyways, my child does have a truly impressive level of mastery over Google Slides and how to quickly get your presentations done in them in both English and French, so there's that.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:52 AM on April 27, 2023 [27 favorites]
My Computer Science class in high school 20 something years ago mostly consisted of us playing Quake. The teacher was a drunk and didn't really care about what we did as long as we were quiet. So I learned pretty much nothing. I did not do well on that AP test...
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:34 PM on April 27
My version of this story involves Starsiege: Tribes and a teacher who was regularly absent because of a chronic illness. Rather than a get a sub they had another computer teacher come check on us periodically, so the room was just a place where people played Tribes and half the computers had a screensaver that showed naked pictures of Marge Simpson.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:59 AM on April 27, 2023
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:34 PM on April 27
My version of this story involves Starsiege: Tribes and a teacher who was regularly absent because of a chronic illness. Rather than a get a sub they had another computer teacher come check on us periodically, so the room was just a place where people played Tribes and half the computers had a screensaver that showed naked pictures of Marge Simpson.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:59 AM on April 27, 2023
My personal best school hack wasn't really a hack nor game related.
When I was a kid I managed to save up enough money to buy an already vintage CP/M based laptop from the infamous DAK discount electronics mail order catalog. It was basically the same thing as the Tandy TRS-80 202, the one with an actual clamshell screen and lid. I think it was an NEC or Sharp called a PC-4800 or something like that, I can't remember. It was a silly little thing, just 32k of RAM and 32k of ROM software, ran off of 4 C cell batteries. Plain old ASCII/ANSI text LCD display, no backlight, no colors, not even greyscale. No disk drives at all, not even a floppy.
I mainly bought it because it had a built in modem and terminal program so I could dial out to BBSes and have my own computer for that. It also had a full sized serial port, parallel port and some other options.
I used to bring it to school in high school all the time and, of course, back then both teachers and students thought this was way too nerdy. I would actually use it in school for taking notes or doing work in the text editor because I hated writing by hand and I first learned to touch type when I was about 8 years old and it was just much nicer to be able to type. It was actually useful even without a floppy drive because I could connect it directly to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printers at home and print from it.
Then one day I was at school and waiting for a guidance counselor, and I noticed there were serial cables sort of stuffed into the corners behind the chairs, and I knew there were these serial cables all over the school in some classrooms, in the library and in offices.
So I plugged one of them in to my silly little laptop, fired up the terminal program and discovered that the serial cables were a live, functioning x.25 style network. I had to mess with my terminal program protocol settings a little.
And then I was suddenly presented with the terminal screens of the school's entire records database front end without so much as a password challenge of any kind. I had access to not only my campus but the entire school district with full read/write permissions.
Which even back then made me gasp something like WHAT THE FUCK and scared me because I definitely should not be seeing those screens and I was worried I was going to get caught and in lots and lots of trouble.
In hindsight I realized that there was no way they could identify that I was an unauthorized user unless someone saw my screen and physically caught me logged in as there was no "fingerprint" or unique ID to my laptop and terminal program aside from the port number of the physical serial cable I was using.
And I really should have gone all in on selling grade changes, or just wiped out the whole database or as much of it as I could. The chances of me actually getting caught were basically zero, and even if I did I was a minor and the laws were still struggling to catch up to "computer intrusion" kinds of legal terms and I would have likely just gotten a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to.
Many years later I started working in educational IT support jobs and have had to play the role of computer cop and gatekeeper, but mainly at colleges, universities and one very bad diploma mill known as Remington College.
And oh, man, people can be persistent about getting access to games, pirated content and porn. So much porn.
One of my favorite incidents was the very bright doofus who somehow kept breaking his TCP/IP config and so one day he picked out a logical IP address in the right block and mask which just happened to be the same IP as our top Microsoft Domain controller and server, which took out most of the entire campus network and links to the outside internet, including the hardware firewall and everything else.
Which if you know Microsoft networking and domain controllers this really shouldn't be possible, but in this case it was because someone fucked up configuring and designing it.
So for a good 15+ minutes we're running around with our hair on fire and someone is looking for a serial patch cable to try to connect directly to some of the network hardware in the server closet to do something about it and the very bright doofus was standing around our help desk and waiting to ask (yet again) why he couldn't get on the network.
And we were like "not now, kid, go away, the whole network is down!" and then my department lead said something like "Well, that's really fucking weird, I can't even ping 192.168.0.1 even though I'm on the direct ethernet port to it..." and the very bright doofus blurts out "OHHHHHHH SHIT SORRY SORRY SORRY" and bolts out of the office with full on cartoon physics kind of speed and we stand around looking at each other with some alarm and confusion until we hear a loud noise and crash of him physically tearing his ethernet cable out of the port in the near by student lounge an study area.
And a few seconds later everything was back up and online and hes back in the helpdesk and IT office holding his laptop with a totally destroyed ethernet cable dangling from it and we're just staring at him like "What the fuck did you do this time!?" as he breathlessly apologized and explained he tried to use that specific IP address. A few minutes after that I was in the lounge and study hall repairing the desktop ethernet port he wrecked.
posted by loquacious at 11:11 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
When I was a kid I managed to save up enough money to buy an already vintage CP/M based laptop from the infamous DAK discount electronics mail order catalog. It was basically the same thing as the Tandy TRS-80 202, the one with an actual clamshell screen and lid. I think it was an NEC or Sharp called a PC-4800 or something like that, I can't remember. It was a silly little thing, just 32k of RAM and 32k of ROM software, ran off of 4 C cell batteries. Plain old ASCII/ANSI text LCD display, no backlight, no colors, not even greyscale. No disk drives at all, not even a floppy.
I mainly bought it because it had a built in modem and terminal program so I could dial out to BBSes and have my own computer for that. It also had a full sized serial port, parallel port and some other options.
I used to bring it to school in high school all the time and, of course, back then both teachers and students thought this was way too nerdy. I would actually use it in school for taking notes or doing work in the text editor because I hated writing by hand and I first learned to touch type when I was about 8 years old and it was just much nicer to be able to type. It was actually useful even without a floppy drive because I could connect it directly to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printers at home and print from it.
Then one day I was at school and waiting for a guidance counselor, and I noticed there were serial cables sort of stuffed into the corners behind the chairs, and I knew there were these serial cables all over the school in some classrooms, in the library and in offices.
So I plugged one of them in to my silly little laptop, fired up the terminal program and discovered that the serial cables were a live, functioning x.25 style network. I had to mess with my terminal program protocol settings a little.
And then I was suddenly presented with the terminal screens of the school's entire records database front end without so much as a password challenge of any kind. I had access to not only my campus but the entire school district with full read/write permissions.
Which even back then made me gasp something like WHAT THE FUCK and scared me because I definitely should not be seeing those screens and I was worried I was going to get caught and in lots and lots of trouble.
In hindsight I realized that there was no way they could identify that I was an unauthorized user unless someone saw my screen and physically caught me logged in as there was no "fingerprint" or unique ID to my laptop and terminal program aside from the port number of the physical serial cable I was using.
And I really should have gone all in on selling grade changes, or just wiped out the whole database or as much of it as I could. The chances of me actually getting caught were basically zero, and even if I did I was a minor and the laws were still struggling to catch up to "computer intrusion" kinds of legal terms and I would have likely just gotten a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to.
Many years later I started working in educational IT support jobs and have had to play the role of computer cop and gatekeeper, but mainly at colleges, universities and one very bad diploma mill known as Remington College.
And oh, man, people can be persistent about getting access to games, pirated content and porn. So much porn.
One of my favorite incidents was the very bright doofus who somehow kept breaking his TCP/IP config and so one day he picked out a logical IP address in the right block and mask which just happened to be the same IP as our top Microsoft Domain controller and server, which took out most of the entire campus network and links to the outside internet, including the hardware firewall and everything else.
Which if you know Microsoft networking and domain controllers this really shouldn't be possible, but in this case it was because someone fucked up configuring and designing it.
So for a good 15+ minutes we're running around with our hair on fire and someone is looking for a serial patch cable to try to connect directly to some of the network hardware in the server closet to do something about it and the very bright doofus was standing around our help desk and waiting to ask (yet again) why he couldn't get on the network.
And we were like "not now, kid, go away, the whole network is down!" and then my department lead said something like "Well, that's really fucking weird, I can't even ping 192.168.0.1 even though I'm on the direct ethernet port to it..." and the very bright doofus blurts out "OHHHHHHH SHIT SORRY SORRY SORRY" and bolts out of the office with full on cartoon physics kind of speed and we stand around looking at each other with some alarm and confusion until we hear a loud noise and crash of him physically tearing his ethernet cable out of the port in the near by student lounge an study area.
And a few seconds later everything was back up and online and hes back in the helpdesk and IT office holding his laptop with a totally destroyed ethernet cable dangling from it and we're just staring at him like "What the fuck did you do this time!?" as he breathlessly apologized and explained he tried to use that specific IP address. A few minutes after that I was in the lounge and study hall repairing the desktop ethernet port he wrecked.
posted by loquacious at 11:11 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
I can't help but wonder about that kid, Foosnark. To have such a thing at that time indicates that they were probably an awesome person.
Man, I wanted one of those so bad when I was a kid and they were still new, even though I knew they weren't really that useful, but pocket-sized BASIC was really sexy back then. I was constantly going to Radio Shack to play around with one for a few minutes. I really wanted the one that Radio Shack sold that was like a little clamshell laptop with a horrible membrane keypad.
Those things were insanely expensive when they were still new.
Some time in the mid 90s I found a working one at a flea market junk stall for $1, and I think I might still have it somewhere.
I once made friends with someone cute and nerdy (as in CalTech undergrad nerdy) at very nerdy Halloween party where it was part of my costume by coding a very simple database while we were chatting and flirting and then handing it to them as a way to ask for their phone number. They were mildly impressed I was able to code anything at all while drinking, smoking and holding a conversation at the same time.
posted by loquacious at 11:26 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Man, I wanted one of those so bad when I was a kid and they were still new, even though I knew they weren't really that useful, but pocket-sized BASIC was really sexy back then. I was constantly going to Radio Shack to play around with one for a few minutes. I really wanted the one that Radio Shack sold that was like a little clamshell laptop with a horrible membrane keypad.
Those things were insanely expensive when they were still new.
Some time in the mid 90s I found a working one at a flea market junk stall for $1, and I think I might still have it somewhere.
I once made friends with someone cute and nerdy (as in CalTech undergrad nerdy) at very nerdy Halloween party where it was part of my costume by coding a very simple database while we were chatting and flirting and then handing it to them as a way to ask for their phone number. They were mildly impressed I was able to code anything at all while drinking, smoking and holding a conversation at the same time.
posted by loquacious at 11:26 AM on April 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
They have liked Minecraft but they don't like, naturally hack their game environments. Neither do their friends.
This is pretty much why I think banned-but-low-consequence and not fully impossible but extremely challenging to overcome technical barriers is the right approach over behavior monitoring.
Being forbidden makes it a natural conduit for constructively channeling the natural rebellion impulse and boundaries testing. Having light consequences makes the reward:risk ratio extremely favorable vs other outlets. Being a legitimate technical challenge but still on the outskirts of possible is instructive on the difficulty-level of real technical challenges outside the learning environment. There’s also a social component where once one kid figures it out, it spreads to all the rest in an exact mirror of expert knowledge distribution in a professional context. Selfishly, it gives those of us with very mild spectrum disorder a bit of a social “in” to start things off on the right foot (which is a godsend when you don’t really understand any of what’s going on around you socially and all you can do is mimic and pray like hell).
When I reference the Eternal War on tyranny above, it is with fondness and appreciation for the degree to which that environment motivated me to self-educate, the ways it steered me towards friends with similar interests, and how it set down the deep structures underpinning programming early enough that I can usually intuit an entire system implementation from a couple variable names or a single sentence comment.
It taught me to love finding ways to escape established confines and to not fear failure despite a social environment where stepping out of line in most other respects meant an angry adult would be beating the living shit out of you not long after.
And once the love of finding your own answers is there, the rest is just developing skill at identifying useful facts and applying them. YMMV.
posted by Ryvar at 11:36 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
This is pretty much why I think banned-but-low-consequence and not fully impossible but extremely challenging to overcome technical barriers is the right approach over behavior monitoring.
Being forbidden makes it a natural conduit for constructively channeling the natural rebellion impulse and boundaries testing. Having light consequences makes the reward:risk ratio extremely favorable vs other outlets. Being a legitimate technical challenge but still on the outskirts of possible is instructive on the difficulty-level of real technical challenges outside the learning environment. There’s also a social component where once one kid figures it out, it spreads to all the rest in an exact mirror of expert knowledge distribution in a professional context. Selfishly, it gives those of us with very mild spectrum disorder a bit of a social “in” to start things off on the right foot (which is a godsend when you don’t really understand any of what’s going on around you socially and all you can do is mimic and pray like hell).
When I reference the Eternal War on tyranny above, it is with fondness and appreciation for the degree to which that environment motivated me to self-educate, the ways it steered me towards friends with similar interests, and how it set down the deep structures underpinning programming early enough that I can usually intuit an entire system implementation from a couple variable names or a single sentence comment.
It taught me to love finding ways to escape established confines and to not fear failure despite a social environment where stepping out of line in most other respects meant an angry adult would be beating the living shit out of you not long after.
And once the love of finding your own answers is there, the rest is just developing skill at identifying useful facts and applying them. YMMV.
posted by Ryvar at 11:36 AM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
In the late 90's, I was the tech literate kid at my small, Christian high school, answering simple PC use questions. One day the principal calls me to the office, points at gay porn on the monitor. "My secretary said that you told her to go to this website!!" He huffed.
Which, technically might have been true, since when she asked how to get an email address I recommended Hotmail....
posted by Jacen at 11:43 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Which, technically might have been true, since when she asked how to get an email address I recommended Hotmail....
posted by Jacen at 11:43 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
*me* reading thread about people hacking calculators to play games
our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time
wait WHAT
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:43 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
our German teacher targeted him for a threeway with her girlfriend on the class trip to Germany (one of the most extreme disparities between “It should have been me, not him!”-at-the-time
wait WHAT
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:43 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
I am saddened that today’s children will never know the joy of discovering how to break out of the library catalog software on the Lynx terminal so you can get to a shell prompt and telnet to a MUD during lunch. But at the same time, I take heart that they have their own modern equivalents that I am now too old understand.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:49 PM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:49 PM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
Bonus points: Upload a uu-encoded binary of a SLIP handler so you can get internet access over the library computer
posted by credulous at 1:24 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by credulous at 1:24 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
When I was in high school in 2010, they just started trying the idea of lending small laptops to the AP students. The next day, a bunch of us tech kids had already made bootable USB sticks to load a different OS like Ubuntu and were playing things like Halo or emulated Nintendo games during our AP Physics class. Our teacher wasn't even upset, she was more impressed that we knew how to do that but asked that we just keep it quiet during lectures.
It was pretty fun. I'm not sure if they ever cracked down on that sort of thing later, but during quarantine, my younger brother was given a chromebook and I started telling him how we got around the security. He never did it though, he was too scared of getting caught. I'd be more worried not doing it though, having all that tracking software reporting to the school what you're doing at all times is way scarier to me.
posted by Jyrz at 1:46 PM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
It was pretty fun. I'm not sure if they ever cracked down on that sort of thing later, but during quarantine, my younger brother was given a chromebook and I started telling him how we got around the security. He never did it though, he was too scared of getting caught. I'd be more worried not doing it though, having all that tracking software reporting to the school what you're doing at all times is way scarier to me.
posted by Jyrz at 1:46 PM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I am saddened that today’s children will never know the joy of discovering how to break out of the library catalog software on the Lynx terminal so you can get to a shell prompt and telnet to a MUD during lunch
It's true, the halcyon days of retrofuturism are far behind us.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:47 PM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's true, the halcyon days of retrofuturism are far behind us.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:47 PM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
Paradox: all of the learning being described in the thread shows young people developing intellectual curiosity, will, and resilience, but without any kind of formal philosophical basis to learning. That’s in contrast to the actual classes being described, which start with the first philosophical principles, but always seem to fail to develop the intellectual personality traits. Notice how different children’s reactions are, in either case, to failing once!
Anyway I offer this observation and draw your attention to the practice heavy, philosophically barren, state of computer and software technologies in the West…
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:26 PM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Anyway I offer this observation and draw your attention to the practice heavy, philosophically barren, state of computer and software technologies in the West…
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:26 PM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
This makes me sad. I was in high school before PCs and before anyone had pocket calculators and all I did was make out with my girlfriend behind the cubicles in the math room.
posted by lhauser at 4:12 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by lhauser at 4:12 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
But I don't think that in the year of our lord 2023, playing Chromebook games is leading to computer literacy or coding (with some exceptions, both in terms of 'which games' and 'which kids.")
It's been my experience that one or two kids in a class will be "good" at tech and interested in making things, while most young learners are happy to click on cookies, play Google Pac-Man, download memes, and in some cases, attempt to download hentai and then cry because they can't get the anime titty virus off their screen and now the lady in the office is going to know what they were doing.
I've basically turned into the Ancient Mariner, holding The Youth with a glittering eye and telling my sad tale of how I'm the slowest typist in my age group because I spent computer lab playing solitaire instead of Mavis Beacon.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:03 PM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
It's been my experience that one or two kids in a class will be "good" at tech and interested in making things, while most young learners are happy to click on cookies, play Google Pac-Man, download memes, and in some cases, attempt to download hentai and then cry because they can't get the anime titty virus off their screen and now the lady in the office is going to know what they were doing.
I've basically turned into the Ancient Mariner, holding The Youth with a glittering eye and telling my sad tale of how I'm the slowest typist in my age group because I spent computer lab playing solitaire instead of Mavis Beacon.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:03 PM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
Hope you didn't like journalism like this because Vice just laid off everyone at Waypoint.
I'm so mad.
posted by JDHarper at 5:17 PM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm so mad.
posted by JDHarper at 5:17 PM on April 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
In the high school I graduated from the typing classes were taught in the same room as computer classes. My typing teacher in 1987, when computers in schools were weird futuristic things, was probably close to sixty. A few of us asked her if we could do our typing exercises on the computers and submit the printouts as our assignments and she was OK with that. Me and the delete key rocked typing class in 1987!
But my day-to-day work now relies heavily on keyboards and I can’t do a thing without looking at the keys.
posted by bendy at 6:48 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
But my day-to-day work now relies heavily on keyboards and I can’t do a thing without looking at the keys.
posted by bendy at 6:48 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I was known for finding ways around the lab restrictions in middle school. They really didn't want us using the computers to have Marathon Infinity LAN parties and would progressively try to lock things down as best they could, but they could never seem to figure out how to restrict read/write access to the Netscape cache folder.
Present day, I really enjoy playing this game of cat and mouse with my kid.
posted by dsword at 7:25 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Present day, I really enjoy playing this game of cat and mouse with my kid.
posted by dsword at 7:25 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
My high school didn't hve a computer lab (Chile, '80s, during the dictatorship), so we started a Computer Club, which meant one kid brought in a ZX-81, we hooked it up to the TV (the single television in the expensive private school school (because '80s Chile9) and played games on it. Good times.
In Arhcitecture school, I peeked over the sysadmin's shoulder when he came to fix some problem and learned his password which worked on every computer on campus. I used my power wisely.
My 15yo makes 3d games in Unity, and he's got a big head start on physics and vectors and such because he had to learn about that stuff for his games.
posted by signal at 7:51 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
In Arhcitecture school, I peeked over the sysadmin's shoulder when he came to fix some problem and learned his password which worked on every computer on campus. I used my power wisely.
My 15yo makes 3d games in Unity, and he's got a big head start on physics and vectors and such because he had to learn about that stuff for his games.
posted by signal at 7:51 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Hope you didn't like journalism like this because Vice just laid off everyone at Waypoint.
I am bereft.
Fuck capitalism, go home.
posted by ominous_paws at 8:48 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I am bereft.
Fuck capitalism, go home.
posted by ominous_paws at 8:48 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Having light consequences makes the reward:risk ratio extremely favorable vs other outlets. Being a legitimate technical challenge but still on the outskirts of possible is instructive on the difficulty-level of real technical challenges outside the learning environment.
Counterpoint: Repeatedly excusing transgressions because of their technical merit may give kids the impression that the rules don't actually matter if you're smart enough. There are lots of disruptive techbros today who probably "got away" with a lot of crap as kids simply because the adults wanted to encourage technical curiosity and were willing to overlook what they did in favor of how they did it.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't encourage kids to lightly test boundaries, but there are definitely people who grew up doing things with impunity because they were "good with computers" and having learned nothing those people are continuing to act as though the rules don't apply to them.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:36 AM on April 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
Counterpoint: Repeatedly excusing transgressions because of their technical merit may give kids the impression that the rules don't actually matter if you're smart enough. There are lots of disruptive techbros today who probably "got away" with a lot of crap as kids simply because the adults wanted to encourage technical curiosity and were willing to overlook what they did in favor of how they did it.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't encourage kids to lightly test boundaries, but there are definitely people who grew up doing things with impunity because they were "good with computers" and having learned nothing those people are continuing to act as though the rules don't apply to them.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:36 AM on April 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
In my day, the cutting edge was Snake on the TI-82.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:54 AM on April 28, 2023
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:54 AM on April 28, 2023
There are lots of disruptive techbros today who probably "got away" with a lot of crap as kids simply because the adults wanted to encourage technical curiosity and were willing to overlook what they did in favor of how they did it.
Curbing efforts to promote kids self-teaching and creative outside-the box thinking is de facto punishing 99% of kids to prevent 1% (or less) from taking away the wrong message and abusing the benefits of that education. The correct answer is pretty obviously an education program that emphasizes empathy and social development alongside. It’s also about early identification of kids on the spectrum and taking the time to really double down on those aspects with them, and where possible taking a personal interest in helping them overcome parts they may be getting stuck on.
You’re never going to elimate every Elon Musk because our system encourages toxic narcissistic behaviors to rise to the top. Capital deliberately fails to police or discourage these behaviors in any way because our leaders aren’t going to bias the system against themselves, and human history is one long story about how capitalism inherently reverts to rewarding and promoting our most selfish individuals. Elevating those most willing to ignore their empathic impulses. We aren’t going to fix that without demolishing capitalism, but in the meantime we can reduce the pool of candidates by doubling down on fostering empathic thinking, and we ought to be doing that already, regardless.
So yeah, I definitely believe that what you’re suggesting is the wrong way to approach or frame the problem, and overall leads to more harm than good. I grew up in a fundie evangelical environment - not just my family but absolutely everyone I knew until I started at a public high school - which I can personally attest encourages narcissistic thinking and attitudes at every level. There’s no cure for that particular case other than fundamentalism dying out, which it is already doing at a steady clip. Rehabilitation needs to be self-charted, and you can watch someone progress through twenty years of that in my comment history if you’re bored and actually curious (and don’t mind reading some pretty horrific shit for the first few years).
posted by Ryvar at 8:21 AM on April 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
Curbing efforts to promote kids self-teaching and creative outside-the box thinking is de facto punishing 99% of kids to prevent 1% (or less) from taking away the wrong message and abusing the benefits of that education. The correct answer is pretty obviously an education program that emphasizes empathy and social development alongside. It’s also about early identification of kids on the spectrum and taking the time to really double down on those aspects with them, and where possible taking a personal interest in helping them overcome parts they may be getting stuck on.
You’re never going to elimate every Elon Musk because our system encourages toxic narcissistic behaviors to rise to the top. Capital deliberately fails to police or discourage these behaviors in any way because our leaders aren’t going to bias the system against themselves, and human history is one long story about how capitalism inherently reverts to rewarding and promoting our most selfish individuals. Elevating those most willing to ignore their empathic impulses. We aren’t going to fix that without demolishing capitalism, but in the meantime we can reduce the pool of candidates by doubling down on fostering empathic thinking, and we ought to be doing that already, regardless.
So yeah, I definitely believe that what you’re suggesting is the wrong way to approach or frame the problem, and overall leads to more harm than good. I grew up in a fundie evangelical environment - not just my family but absolutely everyone I knew until I started at a public high school - which I can personally attest encourages narcissistic thinking and attitudes at every level. There’s no cure for that particular case other than fundamentalism dying out, which it is already doing at a steady clip. Rehabilitation needs to be self-charted, and you can watch someone progress through twenty years of that in my comment history if you’re bored and actually curious (and don’t mind reading some pretty horrific shit for the first few years).
posted by Ryvar at 8:21 AM on April 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
there are definitely people who grew up doing things with impunity because they were "good with computers" and having learned nothing those people are continuing to act as though the rules don't apply to them.
However, since this is how the world actually operates, perhaps it is not such a bad object lesson?
I agree with Ryvar that toxic narcissists will find a way to thwart rules and be awful etc, since that is an essential part of their M.O. and you can't really control that. I just don't want to crab bucket[1] all the kids because one may grow up to be an Elongated Muskrat.
[1] members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.
posted by ananci at 6:55 PM on April 28, 2023
However, since this is how the world actually operates, perhaps it is not such a bad object lesson?
I agree with Ryvar that toxic narcissists will find a way to thwart rules and be awful etc, since that is an essential part of their M.O. and you can't really control that. I just don't want to crab bucket[1] all the kids because one may grow up to be an Elongated Muskrat.
[1] members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.
posted by ananci at 6:55 PM on April 28, 2023
Curbing efforts to promote kids self-teaching and creative outside-the box thinking is de facto punishing 99% of kids to prevent 1% (or less) from taking away the wrong message and abusing the benefits of that education.
I'm not suggesting that. I'm just pushing back against this attitude that we should always reward kids who break the rules if they broke those rules in a sufficiently creative or skillful way. There still have to be boundaries and I don't think it's healthy for smart, creative kids to develop the attitude that they can get away with anything so long as they maintain their wunderkid status. That's how you create sociopaths like Elon Musk.
I grew up within a cohort of technologically savvy kids who were always doing this sort of shit. We knew we could get away with anything because we were "so good with computers". The adults were so proud of our accomplishments. They didn't want to discourage us from being creative or thinking outside the box, so they always found some way to forgive us and congratulate us on being so adept.
Part of being a kid is testing limits, but a big part of testing limits is accepting the consequences. And smart kids shouldn't automatically get a pass just because they're exercising marketable skills like programming.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:56 AM on May 1, 2023
I'm not suggesting that. I'm just pushing back against this attitude that we should always reward kids who break the rules if they broke those rules in a sufficiently creative or skillful way. There still have to be boundaries and I don't think it's healthy for smart, creative kids to develop the attitude that they can get away with anything so long as they maintain their wunderkid status. That's how you create sociopaths like Elon Musk.
I grew up within a cohort of technologically savvy kids who were always doing this sort of shit. We knew we could get away with anything because we were "so good with computers". The adults were so proud of our accomplishments. They didn't want to discourage us from being creative or thinking outside the box, so they always found some way to forgive us and congratulate us on being so adept.
Part of being a kid is testing limits, but a big part of testing limits is accepting the consequences. And smart kids shouldn't automatically get a pass just because they're exercising marketable skills like programming.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:56 AM on May 1, 2023
There are lots of restrictions on school computers are dumb and it's perfectly fine for kids to figure them out and learn how to defeat them. But they need to understand that as dumb as those restrictions are, they're still transgressing and they're assuming the risk of getting caught and being punished. How to judiciously push boundaries knowing that you won't get caught every time is also an important life skill, one which isn't learned if there's no possibility of punishment.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:46 AM on May 1, 2023
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:46 AM on May 1, 2023
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