11 ms·

“Fun disabled by administrator” (2015)

176 points by splatzone 4y ago

fatnoah 4y ago
Wow, this brings me back. My son is now in 9th grade, but I remember having to go to the principal's office of his private school in 4th grade because he'd "hacked the school tablets to install games on them" and, in doing so, rendered the tablets inoperable. After talking to the principal and teacher (IT guy was on vacation, apparently) about how serious and disruptive it was, I still had no clue about what he'd actually done. Later, when we got home, I asked him what he'd done and he let me know that he learned that if he turned-off WiFi via the physical button on the tablet, dino game would appear in the browser. Naturally, he showed his friends, and they all made the great decision to play the game in class. The next morning, I dropped him off a little early so he could show the teacher how to access the game and how to turn WiFi back on.
- kbelder 4y ago
  This really captures the flavor of most interactions between me, my kids, and their school.
josephcsible 4y ago
Better link: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, changed from https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-bugs/c/q_bDW8Jt2dU https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-bugs/c/q.... Thanks!
josephcsible 4y ago
I don't like the Googlers' trend of "make the policy message sound like a fact of life, rather than blaming the people who set the policy".
- tylerag 4y ago
  Fun fact: this is a common technique when dealing with children. > No, you can't leave the table until you eat your vegetables. > No, you can't go play until your chores are done.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Which is a reason why I don't like it here: they're infantilizing the adults who use their products.
    - Rebelgecko 4y ago
      When some of your users are kids and some are adults, it seems like a situation where there really is no happy medium that will make everyone happy. Kind of tricky to deal with users who have diametrically opposed goals. It's interesting how strongly people feel about a basic little game. (full disclosure, I work at Google but I've never had to deal with upset teachers and upset children arguing in bugs assigned to me)
      - astrange 4y ago
        Presenting policies as facts of life (like Meta also does) is usually done to keep the abuse teams away from those angry customers and so they don’t have to reveal their anti-spam techniques. Security by obscurity does work for a while. There are ways to get companies to actually pay attention to you; a good place to start is sending registered mail to an executive in a way that looks like you might be a lawyer. patio11 has more advice on this.
  - watwut 4y ago
    I think this is more of the case of not turning on playstation or tv while they do homework. The ticket is literally about distraction - the kid intends to do work, the game is literally placed in the middle and the kid forgets what was original goal. 100% normal for kids and I would not blamed neither them nor teachers.
- 4y ago
askiiart 4y ago
They did make the image for this a surprised T-Rex with the asteroid raining down behind it, and it looks great, so I'm not even that mad...
isoprophlex 4y ago
It is my instinctive reaction that if you think you can win your students hearts and minds by eliminating distractions like this, you don't belong in education. On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings instead of paying attention to class. To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.
- Dawnyhf2 4y ago
  [flagged]
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Indeed. A lot of bad teachers are ready to blame anything but themselves for their kids not paying attention in their classes. Too many schools just end up with this mindset that the kids HAVE to listen in class, and in order for them to, we just have to somehow force them by removing ANY alternative thing they could be doing, that way they will have no choice. And those same people wonder why the kids say school feels like prison.
  - analog31 4y ago
    To be fair, the teachers are hopelessly outgunned here. They're competing with a deep pockets industry that can develop infinitely addictive, engaging content that is also designed to be de-educational. Trying to make successful educational media on the same playing field is hopeless. For one thing, the resources for doing that don't exist. For another, kids can instantly perceive that something "educational" is going to be slightly more boring than something purely entertaining and addictive. The playing field can't be leveled. Third, we're really not helping them by reinforcing that the only way to learn is to be saturated in addictive media content. Disclaimer: I'm not sure education was ever all that great, but there were people sincerely trying to make it better.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      TFA is about teachers being outgunned by the t-rex game. If they can not even outcompete the t-rex game they should not be teaching. A generation back this would have been minesweeper and solitaire. These are all boring games. Further back students would just be doodling in their notebooks. And they still do. These are not highly entertaining activities with which you can't compete.
Aeolun 4y ago
I’m not sure this policy does anything but make the admins feel better.
- lewdev 4y ago
  Nah, I'm just imagining the stickler teachers being like, "A game? Fun? In school? That must NOT be allowed!" And being satisfied when it's removed.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    I know a teacher who regularly sent in help desk tickets of the form "site X has a game on it, so please block it at the firewall".
  - silvestrov 4y ago
    A much better (and mature) approach would be to ask google to turn the game into something educational. Nothing is better for education than pupils thinking they are gaming when they are really learning useful stuff.
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      I'm old enough to remember having an absolute blast playing Number Munchers off a floppy disk on a DOS computer.
    - notRobot 4y ago
      Or you could just let them play a damn game.
jrockway 4y ago
I'm glad that we didn't have "enterprise enrollment" back when I was learning computers. (I had a Tandy 1000 with a BASIC interpreter.) The whole thread seems a lot like "concern trolling" to me. Every ChromeOS administrator knows kids can go to a website to play games, or type one into the Javascript console, but act outraged that there's a tiny easter egg in a web browser. "They're going to make us get rid of the Chromebooks if you don't turn this off!!!!11" Uh huh. I'm sure the taxpayers will want to throw away a couple million dollars worth of laptops because if you turn WiFi off you can play with a little dinosaur.
rzzzt 4y ago
I got a chuckle out of Edward, the frontend person learning about differences between the renderer and the browser process, which at this point is laid out for everyone in Electron's documentation: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-model https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-mode... I was struggling with this as well the first time I wanted to look inside an Electron app. (Also that the change stopped the fun for Googlers that had enrolled devices as well. Is that still true?)
- rav 4y ago
  crbug 462221 links to crbug 471738 [1] - in which they change it from a simple "is device enrolled?" check into something that can be controlled with some kind of policy (not sure about the specifics). I'm not a Googler but based on 462221#c18 [2] it seems like turning off the easter egg would lead to some small but significant pushback, so I'm guessing they have a way to set the policy (even if there's no UI for it in the Google Admin Console). [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738 [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221#c18 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221...
aflag 4y ago
At the moment that what you have to say sounds less interesting than playing the trex game, you know you've failed.
siva7 4y ago
If you are more worried about your students playing some easter egg game instead of improving your teaching, you have already lost connection to the folks you're trying to teach.
- misterflibble 4y ago
  You've typed exactly what I was thinking, in a far more eloquent way than I could have worded it. Reminds me of the constant battle between my high school's sys admin and those smart kids who knew all the Windows 2000 network commands!
- weakfortress 4y ago
  Tell me you've never tried to teach children without telling me you've never tried to teach children.
  - siva7 4y ago
    I did. Now what?
    - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
      Semantic'ly ambiguous. You did tell, or you did teach? (-:
graderjs 4y ago
Ugh...disgusting. But anyway I thought it was going to be some hitherto-unknown Linux command line tool called `fun` that was sudo only.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I think the wording of the error message that was eventually implemented is still off because in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device! I doubt the effectiveness of turning off this game, kids will be distracted either way. Does it really matter if they play the dinosaur game or stare out of the window?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device! Which should be illegal. If the parents have to pay for a Chromebook, then the parents should have final control over it, not the school district.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I completely agree. Sadly, the people in charge don't seem to care.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    I was always really irritated by the requirement to spend $150 to get my son a HP graphing calculator, for the privilege of taking geometry. Come to think of it, though, he did write a primitive choose-your-own-adventure on the calculator.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  In some areas, many schools have been retrofitted or rebuilt with only one tiny window per classroom, and the desks arrayed with the window behind the students. Aside from energy efficiency, the usual rationalisation I've received is that students being able to see out the windows makes it "too difficult" for the teachers. To me, this seems like trying to making the entire environment more boring than the already-boring lesson/teacher in the vain hope that this will lead to magical goodness. Anecdata: I had almost exclusively schools with huge walls of windows, and the 'distraction' of the outside world was all that made some of my lessons bearable. Mind-numbing boredom is not a paved road to teaching me and getting me to retain much. I definitely observed and received correction for excessive distraction sometimes. This also happened in classrooms that had no interesting views. For me, the more dull and utilitarian the classroom, the more likely I'll spend the class time reading ahead in the literature book, writing about other topics in my notebook, or drawing. Trying to "remove distractions" instead of livening up the course material may be…pessimal.
bastawhiz 4y ago
When I was in middle school, I discovered that the content filter proxy server could be bypassed: it ran on port 8080, but outside of the school's firewall. So if you found another proxy running on 8080, you could use that instead. I found an RSS feed of proxy servers and their addresses. So I wrote a VB6 app that would pull it, set the registry key for a proxy server, open the embeddable browser in the background, and time how long it takes to load a bunch of popular sites. It would iterate through the list of servers, and finally settle on the server that had the fastest load times. When you closed the program, it would set the registry key back. At the time, autorun.ini was still a thing. All of my friends had flash drives that would "turn off" the firewall when they plugged them in. I was a young teenager. If you think you can stop a determined kid from bypassing your rules, you're fighting the wrong battle.
- weakfortress 4y ago
  A child determined to do this (I also did it) is not the target of such a program. If you're smart enough to do that, you're probably smart enough to pass classes without much effort. Especially given the innate drive to not only discover a new way to bypass the system but also to automate it. Chances are you did well in school, especially in subjects you enjoyed, because being challenged drives you to innovate. "If you think you can stop a determined kid" is trivializing the matter. Your average child will spend 24 hours a day melting their brain on TikTok. Not reading the ancient tomes of programmers gone by on how to better automate their bypasses. Your example actually demonstrates in a roundabout way that it's not there to stop determined adversaries who are likely self-driven enough to learn anyway. A certain, largely average, cohort of students do not have this ability, will never possess this ability, and will likely with much effort pass with middling grades. These people are highly susceptible to failing when distractions are introduced. Stopping them should be priority number 1 in any school district worth their salt.
buttocks 4y ago
All the armchair education experts in this thread who say it’s not the distraction, it’s the poor teaching, (1) have never set foot in a k12 classroom as an adult; (2) completely forget their own experience as k12 students. You can have the most engaging lessons and any small distraction will kill the momentum.
- fordsmith 4y ago
  I am sorry but I cannot agree with this at all. It is not long ago that I went through this education, but there are far too many poor teachers. Education is a difficult problem to solve, but that doesn't mean that banning anything that competes with the attention is the solution. If teachers are so boring such that the majority of students are turning to a dinosaur game, then the lesson is already not going to be learned. Might as well just give them a pamphlet and tell them to study for the test, as that is what is basically happening anyways but with more timing flexibility. If it is only a minority of students doing the dinosaur game, then they will turn to something else anyways. Thus the blanket policy it implements according to other commenters just ruins it for others.
worldmerge 4y ago
While the topic of teaching has come up, are there schools that do project-based learning in high school-ish settings? Like teaching kids geometry through wood shop class? Seems like a fun thing to teach, at least for a few years, teaching kids skills via projects.
jtsiskin 4y ago
The attached commit: https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003 https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003 is bad - because it gives an error message stating the owner has disabled the dinosaur game, but gates the game just based on whether the device is enrolled. The owner has not explicitly disabled the game, nor has any way to reenable it, as the message suggests; google has.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  The bug report's thread's a fun glimpse into Google org politics on why that specific wording and that specific implementation happened.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
If you’re a teacher and your teaching is less interesting and compelling than the T-Rex game then maybe it’s a sign.
- kortex 4y ago
  It's not necessarily the teacher's fault. They could be perfectly adequate (not extremely boring as a baseline), but you have students that may have ADHD, ODD, etc, and just the temptation knowing the hidden game is there is enough to jack up the excitement level of an otherwise rather boring game enough to detract from classes.
  - samtho 4y ago
    I suppose the irony here would be that if “Fun” had not been disabled by the administrator however, the ADHD kids might be playing the dinosaur game and actually able to listen better (rather than wasting class time attempting to bypass it)
kodah 4y ago
> Also harmful for teachers that are trying to keep their students focused, not playing games I really regret the number of things we're allowed to casually refer to as "harm". That word used to be significant to me but now carries very little weight, manifesting instead as inconvenience, frustration, or, in this case, distraction.
- TheCleric 4y ago
  I think this is harm though. One of the definitions of harm is: "actual or potential ill effect or danger" This does have a potential ill effect: students playing games instead of following along with the lesson. The teacher isn't being harmed, but the student's education is being harmed.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    No, calling this harm is sadly laughable. If teachers can be so boring that the t-rex game outcompetes them for the attention of students then the problem is teachers not the game. I understand that not al teachers can be like Richard Feynman or Tatiana Erukhimova or Walter Lewin but surely we should expect them to be better than the t-rex game. Many schools have wardens instead of teachers.
- weakfortress 4y ago
  This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For example, one my relatives has a 10 year old who is glued to their phone all day watching tiktok or youtube. In this particular case it's the parent's fault, but that is not my point. At school the kids are there to learn. If this is how many kids are at home if you give them unlimited access to the internet it will harm their education. Arguing the semantics is pointless.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students. Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates more problems.
asddubs 4y ago
>Nit pick about 'Dinosaurs are extinct' is that there's clearly an icon of the t-rex displayed on the page unless we switched out the icon with the asteroids one. so this is what working at google is like huh

176 points by splatzone 4y ago

Wow, this brings me back. My son is now in 9th grade, but I remember having to go to the principal's office of his private school in 4th grade because he'd "hacked the school tablets to install games on them" and, in doing so, rendered the tablets inoperable. After talking to the principal and teacher (IT guy was on vacation, apparently) about how serious and disruptive it was, I still had no clue about what he'd actually done. Later, when we got home, I asked him what he'd done and he let me know that he learned that if he turned-off WiFi via the physical button on the tablet, dino game would appear in the browser. Naturally, he showed his friends, and they all made the great decision to play the game in class. The next morning, I dropped him off a little early so he could show the teacher how to access the game and how to turn WiFi back on.

kbelder 4y ago
This really captures the flavor of most interactions between me, my kids, and their school.

josephcsible 4y ago

Better link: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221

dang 4y ago
Ok, changed from https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-bugs/c/q_bDW8Jt2dU https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-bugs/c/q.... Thanks!

josephcsible 4y ago

I don't like the Googlers' trend of "make the policy message sound like a fact of life, rather than blaming the people who set the policy".

tylerag 4y ago
Fun fact: this is a common technique when dealing with children. > No, you can't leave the table until you eat your vegetables. > No, you can't go play until your chores are done.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Which is a reason why I don't like it here: they're infantilizing the adults who use their products.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    When some of your users are kids and some are adults, it seems like a situation where there really is no happy medium that will make everyone happy. Kind of tricky to deal with users who have diametrically opposed goals. It's interesting how strongly people feel about a basic little game. (full disclosure, I work at Google but I've never had to deal with upset teachers and upset children arguing in bugs assigned to me)
    - astrange 4y ago
      Presenting policies as facts of life (like Meta also does) is usually done to keep the abuse teams away from those angry customers and so they don’t have to reveal their anti-spam techniques. Security by obscurity does work for a while. There are ways to get companies to actually pay attention to you; a good place to start is sending registered mail to an executive in a way that looks like you might be a lawyer. patio11 has more advice on this.
- watwut 4y ago
  I think this is more of the case of not turning on playstation or tv while they do homework. The ticket is literally about distraction - the kid intends to do work, the game is literally placed in the middle and the kid forgets what was original goal. 100% normal for kids and I would not blamed neither them nor teachers.
4y ago

askiiart 4y ago

They did make the image for this a surprised T-Rex with the asteroid raining down behind it, and it looks great, so I'm not even that mad...

isoprophlex 4y ago

It is my instinctive reaction that if you think you can win your students hearts and minds by eliminating distractions like this, you don't belong in education. On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings instead of paying attention to class. To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.

Dawnyhf2 4y ago
[flagged]
scrollaway 4y ago
Indeed. A lot of bad teachers are ready to blame anything but themselves for their kids not paying attention in their classes. Too many schools just end up with this mindset that the kids HAVE to listen in class, and in order for them to, we just have to somehow force them by removing ANY alternative thing they could be doing, that way they will have no choice. And those same people wonder why the kids say school feels like prison.
- analog31 4y ago
  To be fair, the teachers are hopelessly outgunned here. They're competing with a deep pockets industry that can develop infinitely addictive, engaging content that is also designed to be de-educational. Trying to make successful educational media on the same playing field is hopeless. For one thing, the resources for doing that don't exist. For another, kids can instantly perceive that something "educational" is going to be slightly more boring than something purely entertaining and addictive. The playing field can't be leveled. Third, we're really not helping them by reinforcing that the only way to learn is to be saturated in addictive media content. Disclaimer: I'm not sure education was ever all that great, but there were people sincerely trying to make it better.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    TFA is about teachers being outgunned by the t-rex game. If they can not even outcompete the t-rex game they should not be teaching. A generation back this would have been minesweeper and solitaire. These are all boring games. Further back students would just be doodling in their notebooks. And they still do. These are not highly entertaining activities with which you can't compete.

Aeolun 4y ago

I’m not sure this policy does anything but make the admins feel better.

lewdev 4y ago
Nah, I'm just imagining the stickler teachers being like, "A game? Fun? In school? That must NOT be allowed!" And being satisfied when it's removed.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I know a teacher who regularly sent in help desk tickets of the form "site X has a game on it, so please block it at the firewall".
- silvestrov 4y ago
  A much better (and mature) approach would be to ask google to turn the game into something educational. Nothing is better for education than pupils thinking they are gaming when they are really learning useful stuff.
  - bastawhiz 4y ago
    I'm old enough to remember having an absolute blast playing Number Munchers off a floppy disk on a DOS computer.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    Or you could just let them play a damn game.

jrockway 4y ago

I'm glad that we didn't have "enterprise enrollment" back when I was learning computers. (I had a Tandy 1000 with a BASIC interpreter.) The whole thread seems a lot like "concern trolling" to me. Every ChromeOS administrator knows kids can go to a website to play games, or type one into the Javascript console, but act outraged that there's a tiny easter egg in a web browser. "They're going to make us get rid of the Chromebooks if you don't turn this off!!!!11" Uh huh. I'm sure the taxpayers will want to throw away a couple million dollars worth of laptops because if you turn WiFi off you can play with a little dinosaur.

rzzzt 4y ago

I got a chuckle out of Edward, the frontend person learning about differences between the renderer and the browser process, which at this point is laid out for everyone in Electron's documentation: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-model https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-mode... I was struggling with this as well the first time I wanted to look inside an Electron app. (Also that the change stopped the fun for Googlers that had enrolled devices as well. Is that still true?)

rav 4y ago
crbug 462221 links to crbug 471738 [1] - in which they change it from a simple "is device enrolled?" check into something that can be controlled with some kind of policy (not sure about the specifics). I'm not a Googler but based on 462221#c18 [2] it seems like turning off the easter egg would lead to some small but significant pushback, so I'm guessing they have a way to set the policy (even if there's no UI for it in the Google Admin Console). [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=471738 [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221#c18 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=462221...

aflag 4y ago

At the moment that what you have to say sounds less interesting than playing the trex game, you know you've failed.

siva7 4y ago

If you are more worried about your students playing some easter egg game instead of improving your teaching, you have already lost connection to the folks you're trying to teach.

misterflibble 4y ago
You've typed exactly what I was thinking, in a far more eloquent way than I could have worded it. Reminds me of the constant battle between my high school's sys admin and those smart kids who knew all the Windows 2000 network commands!
weakfortress 4y ago
Tell me you've never tried to teach children without telling me you've never tried to teach children.
- siva7 4y ago
  I did. Now what?
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    Semantic'ly ambiguous. You did tell, or you did teach? (-:

graderjs 4y ago

Ugh...disgusting. But anyway I thought it was going to be some hitherto-unknown Linux command line tool called `fun` that was sudo only.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I think the wording of the error message that was eventually implemented is still off because in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device! I doubt the effectiveness of turning off this game, kids will be distracted either way. Does it really matter if they play the dinosaur game or stare out of the window?

josephcsible 4y ago
> in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device! Which should be illegal. If the parents have to pay for a Chromebook, then the parents should have final control over it, not the school district.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I completely agree. Sadly, the people in charge don't seem to care.
- kbelder 4y ago
  I was always really irritated by the requirement to spend $150 to get my son a HP graphing calculator, for the privilege of taking geometry. Come to think of it, though, he did write a primitive choose-your-own-adventure on the calculator.
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
In some areas, many schools have been retrofitted or rebuilt with only one tiny window per classroom, and the desks arrayed with the window behind the students. Aside from energy efficiency, the usual rationalisation I've received is that students being able to see out the windows makes it "too difficult" for the teachers. To me, this seems like trying to making the entire environment more boring than the already-boring lesson/teacher in the vain hope that this will lead to magical goodness. Anecdata: I had almost exclusively schools with huge walls of windows, and the 'distraction' of the outside world was all that made some of my lessons bearable. Mind-numbing boredom is not a paved road to teaching me and getting me to retain much. I definitely observed and received correction for excessive distraction sometimes. This also happened in classrooms that had no interesting views. For me, the more dull and utilitarian the classroom, the more likely I'll spend the class time reading ahead in the literature book, writing about other topics in my notebook, or drawing. Trying to "remove distractions" instead of livening up the course material may be…pessimal.

bastawhiz 4y ago

When I was in middle school, I discovered that the content filter proxy server could be bypassed: it ran on port 8080, but outside of the school's firewall. So if you found another proxy running on 8080, you could use that instead. I found an RSS feed of proxy servers and their addresses. So I wrote a VB6 app that would pull it, set the registry key for a proxy server, open the embeddable browser in the background, and time how long it takes to load a bunch of popular sites. It would iterate through the list of servers, and finally settle on the server that had the fastest load times. When you closed the program, it would set the registry key back. At the time, autorun.ini was still a thing. All of my friends had flash drives that would "turn off" the firewall when they plugged them in. I was a young teenager. If you think you can stop a determined kid from bypassing your rules, you're fighting the wrong battle.

weakfortress 4y ago
A child determined to do this (I also did it) is not the target of such a program. If you're smart enough to do that, you're probably smart enough to pass classes without much effort. Especially given the innate drive to not only discover a new way to bypass the system but also to automate it. Chances are you did well in school, especially in subjects you enjoyed, because being challenged drives you to innovate. "If you think you can stop a determined kid" is trivializing the matter. Your average child will spend 24 hours a day melting their brain on TikTok. Not reading the ancient tomes of programmers gone by on how to better automate their bypasses. Your example actually demonstrates in a roundabout way that it's not there to stop determined adversaries who are likely self-driven enough to learn anyway. A certain, largely average, cohort of students do not have this ability, will never possess this ability, and will likely with much effort pass with middling grades. These people are highly susceptible to failing when distractions are introduced. Stopping them should be priority number 1 in any school district worth their salt.

buttocks 4y ago

All the armchair education experts in this thread who say it’s not the distraction, it’s the poor teaching, (1) have never set foot in a k12 classroom as an adult; (2) completely forget their own experience as k12 students. You can have the most engaging lessons and any small distraction will kill the momentum.

fordsmith 4y ago
I am sorry but I cannot agree with this at all. It is not long ago that I went through this education, but there are far too many poor teachers. Education is a difficult problem to solve, but that doesn't mean that banning anything that competes with the attention is the solution. If teachers are so boring such that the majority of students are turning to a dinosaur game, then the lesson is already not going to be learned. Might as well just give them a pamphlet and tell them to study for the test, as that is what is basically happening anyways but with more timing flexibility. If it is only a minority of students doing the dinosaur game, then they will turn to something else anyways. Thus the blanket policy it implements according to other commenters just ruins it for others.

worldmerge 4y ago

While the topic of teaching has come up, are there schools that do project-based learning in high school-ish settings? Like teaching kids geometry through wood shop class? Seems like a fun thing to teach, at least for a few years, teaching kids skills via projects.

jtsiskin 4y ago

The attached commit: https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003 https://codereview.chromium.org/977323003 is bad - because it gives an error message stating the owner has disabled the dinosaur game, but gates the game just based on whether the device is enrolled. The owner has not explicitly disabled the game, nor has any way to reenable it, as the message suggests; google has.

trynewideas 4y ago
The bug report's thread's a fun glimpse into Google org politics on why that specific wording and that specific implementation happened.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

If you’re a teacher and your teaching is less interesting and compelling than the T-Rex game then maybe it’s a sign.

kortex 4y ago
It's not necessarily the teacher's fault. They could be perfectly adequate (not extremely boring as a baseline), but you have students that may have ADHD, ODD, etc, and just the temptation knowing the hidden game is there is enough to jack up the excitement level of an otherwise rather boring game enough to detract from classes.
- samtho 4y ago
  I suppose the irony here would be that if “Fun” had not been disabled by the administrator however, the ADHD kids might be playing the dinosaur game and actually able to listen better (rather than wasting class time attempting to bypass it)

kodah 4y ago

> Also harmful for teachers that are trying to keep their students focused, not playing games I really regret the number of things we're allowed to casually refer to as "harm". That word used to be significant to me but now carries very little weight, manifesting instead as inconvenience, frustration, or, in this case, distraction.

TheCleric 4y ago
I think this is harm though. One of the definitions of harm is: "actual or potential ill effect or danger" This does have a potential ill effect: students playing games instead of following along with the lesson. The teacher isn't being harmed, but the student's education is being harmed.
- alexvoda 4y ago
  No, calling this harm is sadly laughable. If teachers can be so boring that the t-rex game outcompetes them for the attention of students then the problem is teachers not the game. I understand that not al teachers can be like Richard Feynman or Tatiana Erukhimova or Walter Lewin but surely we should expect them to be better than the t-rex game. Many schools have wardens instead of teachers.
weakfortress 4y ago
This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For example, one my relatives has a 10 year old who is glued to their phone all day watching tiktok or youtube. In this particular case it's the parent's fault, but that is not my point. At school the kids are there to learn. If this is how many kids are at home if you give them unlimited access to the internet it will harm their education. Arguing the semantics is pointless.
- kodah 4y ago
  Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students. Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates more problems.

asddubs 4y ago

>Nit pick about 'Dinosaurs are extinct' is that there's clearly an icon of the t-rex displayed on the page unless we switched out the icon with the asteroids one. so this is what working at google is like huh