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Kids trying to play video games on school laptops

116 points by cpeterso 4y ago

schnitzelstoat 4y ago
I went to school like 20 years ago and I spent computing class getting around the security tool, installing Doom 95 and a SNES emulator and then playing multiplayer Street Fighter 2 and Doom 95 with my friends in the class (they both supported LAN play!) I still went to University and got a Physics degree. I think the most important thing is that the kids feel that the class is important, I felt computing class (which was basically Microsoft Office class) was a waste of time, so I just played games. But I understood that I had to study a good degree to get a good job. So in Maths, Science etc. I paid complete attention.
- throwawayfaang9 4y ago
  I had a similar experience. The difference is that was restricted to just computer lab. Now kids have computers on their desks during many more classes. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect they can stay focused.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
neom 4y ago
My high schools IT manager got so sick of me he eventually just gave me creds and told me if I abused his trust he'd be really disappointed in me. I never bypassed a single filter system once, just made sure whatever computer I was on was functioning, up to date, didn't need any attention and fixed anything broken. In retrospect, Weird way to get me to stop fucking around, but worked extremely well for him.
- em-bee 4y ago
  this is the way. my sons teacher made him class monitor, that means he had to report if other kids broke rules. i found that somewhat strange to have such a role, but the teacher said that it would stop my son from trying to break rules, because he would have to report himself.
lucumo 4y ago
Hacking school security prepares these kids for the real world, where they have to hack company security to get any shit done. (Yes, I'm salty at a lot of security theater in companies with Big Dumb Company Disease.)
ssss11 4y ago
At my high school in the nineties I found a way to escape the locked down environment via a windows dialog somehow, I’d run solitaire and everyone else was dumbfounded - good times!
physicsguy 4y ago
This is nothing new. The game N was an exe and I worked out through trial and error that if you ran the exe through a compressed file format like zip, it bypassed the school’s antivirus. That was in about 2005!
nightowl_games 4y ago
I work on games that are played on school Chromebooks and are om crazy games. Honestly I think it's a bit sad that schools are so dependent on Chromebooks. I didn't have a Chromebook at school when I went. I think I'd learn worse on a Chromebook than a teacher. We installed the halo free trial on our school computers and played blood gulch CTF in the computer lab all the time. It was awesome. Miniclip was huge on these Sun Microsystems machines we had. Good times.
seabird 4y ago
Our thing in high school was Sauerbraten one-shot-one-kill. The teacher didn't care as long as all the assignments got done. I would throw up an FTP server, everybody would download the client, and then we'd pass around the current IP and go ham. It was probably the most file management and "real" computer usage a lot of those kids ever did.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I always just befriended the teachers and computer lab supervisors by getting the work done first and then asking to play for the remaining time in the period. Even the more strict teachers always made a deal of some sort. I’d share flash drives loaded with halo combat evolved trial, Warcraft III, and a plethora of MAME games and that incentivized other students who wanted to play with me. It could be a learning tool if expectations are set right. But yeah it did lead to some kids trying to just play games all period too and would have to later fail the class and do summer packets. But it sure did lead to results for the majority.
okeuro49 4y ago
There's zero need for each child to have a Chromebook. The drive for technology in the classroom is for the benefit of manufacturers, not children. However the "Zoom classrooms" during Coronavirus have probably now made it difficult to go back.
asdasd213123 4y ago
Installing linux on my school issued Chromebook was my first experience with linux and really helped me learn all of the computer related things I wanted to learn but the school failed to give me an opportunity to.
arkaic 4y ago
This goes back even when I was in high school. I'd install SNES emulators on the windows XP machines to play super Mario world
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
The best trick we discovered was that powerpoint would run flash games if you embedded them on a slide. You could turn up to school with a powerpoint full of flash games and play them full screen on any computer. Impossible to block because there’s no web traffic.
anthk 4y ago
Give the kids the SGT puzzles web page.
0x978 4y ago
This is a great read, I recently fell down the rabbithole reading about all the different versions of minecraft that have been cracked and playable in the browser so kids can play it on school laptops, that was a great thread to follow too.
Shared404 4y ago
Speaking as a past kid trying to play video games on school laptops, I'm really grateful for the experience. Some of my first experience with reverse engineering/pentesting methodologies came from extracting flash games from websites so they could run without getting net-nannied, or learning that you could use google translate to run a makeshift web proxy. Honestly helped kickstart a lot of my learning about computers.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  I visited my high school a few years after graduating. My secret persys.sys folder (full of games) was still there. Fun times. That was the era of painfully slow (~10min) windows boot times. At one point, teenage me had a floppy with unetbootin to boot a flash drive with tinycore. I could get a browser running a solid 8min. before anyone else. Regardless of the fun, there was still a dark side. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt should not be the foundation of education.
adriand 4y ago
This relates to something that has been bugging me lately, which is as a parent I have zero parental control over the devices that our school board issues to my children. My kids have iPhones and iPads, which are part of my Apple family account, and I can both monitor what they are doing and also set limits on screen time including hours of usage and for particular apps. However, I recently became aware that my son was staying up until the wee hours of the morning scrolling on Instagram and YouTube, using his school-issued iPad, and I had no idea this was happening. I am not entirely sure how to approach this. On the one hand, I am unsympathetic to parents who might want the kind of control that prevents children from accessing information about sexuality, for example. On the other, I really don’t want my kids to have unfettered access to social media and YouTube entirely without my knowledge. Suggestions on this are welcome.
- JenrHywy 4y ago
  I have timeboxed access for devices controlled at the router - kids devices are blocked after their bed time, and all devices are blocked after midnight (which has been a good thing for me, too). It doesn't stop them from playing a local game, but the removal of the internet seems to break most of the desire to use devices inappropriately.
- prepend 4y ago
  This was a big issue for me. My school wouldn’t give me visibility into the laptop, they wouldn’t let me set screen time controls, wouldn’t let me tune content filters when they were out of school, wouldn’t let me install apps that I purchased, wouldn’t let kids message parents, and wanted me to sign these blanket “we can capture all data, including camera and microphone, sell it to whomever we want, and do whatever we want with it” waivers. Aside from teaching kids to be slaves to sysadmins and kind of crushing the coolest part of computers, they were basically making kids take care of these expensive bricks. And that’s a lot of work for an 8 year old. I think it’s more due to stupidity than any agenda, but still not something I want to be involved with. I bought cheap refurbed macbookairs that sync to screen time controls with other devices, have pretty decent privacy controls, I have root school doesn’t, they can message me and other family members, and the battery lasts two days. The school didn’t like it, but I had to make a stink and said either this or do special paper assignments. My kids were embarrassed but now appreciate just putting their laptop into their backpack instead of laptop plus charger and charging it all day. The school still issues their laptops some days for exams that will only run on their equipment. Whatever that means.
more_corn 4y ago
I got my start in computers figuring out how to play games on school computers. No class or degree could have taught me as much or been as valuable for my career. Educators shouldn’t try too har to win this arms race. Losing is also winning.
sharkweek 4y ago
As with many here I'm sure, during "computer lab" I was often done with assignments quite quickly all through school. The teachers rarely had any extra work to assign me so they pretty much gave me carte blanche to use my time however I wanted as long as it was on the computer. Great memories of trying to skirt school "blockers" in order to get to gaming websites in high school (this would have been in the early 00s). Glad to see this spirit is still alive and well and probably even moreso now than ever.
- croutonwagon 4y ago
  I once got suspended because I figured out how to bypass my schools lockdown policies on the computers in the lab and wouldnt tell them how i did it. (Hint: i learned they kept the "bypass" code in clear text in the registry, and later simply killed the processes from a command prompt with a batch file). I also had a small apache server and ftp box i would tunnel though or get executables from i wanted to play (like pinball, the monsters blocked pinball). Since it was the very early days of the internet my morning routine generally consisted of waiting for folks to leave, firing up the server and taking over the fax line for the day and getting the IP before heading off to school. I used a scheduler (probably cron, i dont remember) to bring it all down around 3pm before my parents got home.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    Did they ever notice anything amiss with the phone bill?
    - croutonwagon 4y ago
      My pops was in sales. The fax line itself was a write off. That said, at one point he told a colleague to fax him something and he would pick it up at home and it was busy, which got me busted. Mostly the fax line was used then for him to send his receipt scans into accounting though. I was grounded for that as well. But it was also near/around the time that broadband/docsis was rolling out so they moved to it at some point soon after. My tech inept dad was what got me into tech honestly. He had a nack for turning off the computer by just holding the power button back in the windows 95 days. Eventually he corrupted the thing, blamed me and forced me to "fix" it with gateway support. I ended up searching up how to install an OS at the school lab, and just re-installed windows for him and stopped using a computer at home until i could get my own.
butlike 4y ago
This game of cat-and-mouse has existed for at least as long as I've been in school (21 years ago). Back then it was calculator games, finding an unblocked flash site game, or booting games off USBs. One of the best weeks ever was when we got Unreal Tournament (the original) to boot off USBs and work on the LAN. ~20 person in-class deathmatch games were wild.
surgical_fire 4y ago
Ahh, reminds me of the old days playing Doom in my school's computer lab. Good times.
sonzohan 4y ago
Good time for me to finish my DEFCON talk: Spoofing UEFI to play Fortnite on a Chromebook at 60FPS :)
themikejr 4y ago
So many good memories here, like making a website that curated flash games on unblocked domains and sharing floppy disks with emulators and a ROM or two.
timw4mail 4y ago
I kind of miss the days of school-sanctioned educational games, like those from MECC / The Learning Company. Of course the quality varied, but it made sense as a reward for finishing an assignment, where it could still be fun, but still be educational.
- soupfordummies 4y ago
  Playing Gizmos and Gadgets on the old IBMs token-ring'd together at school was where it all began for me and computers :) EDIT: One teacher even had an Apple II with "Touch the Target" Really makes me feel old thinking about it now-- it wasn't really THAT long ago but then again I guess it was.
- RheingoldRiver 4y ago
  I truly miss Number Munchers haha. We played until the game crashed because the computer running it ran out of memory. Somewhere around n=13 for the prime number version (the only version worth playing). Probably because at that point there were too many monsters on the board.
amflare 4y ago
Good for them. As long as it's not dangerous, I'm on the side of the kids on this one. And it looks like there are plenty of adults supervising the situation to keep it reasonably safe (it is the internet after all). The kids are going to learn a lot of useful skills and develop a fascination with computers that will stay with them for years if not their whole lives.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
My generation was writing games on school computers. Now they struggle to play them. Kids these days! Happy to consume content endlessly. It has to mean something. { Old man shakes his cane at young people. }
- spiderice 4y ago
  What percentage of your generation was actually writing games on school computers? 0.1%? If that. That number is definitely higher today, given that they have computer programming classes in schools now. I get that you're trying to make a self aware joke about your comment with the old man shaking his cane. But this comment really is completely out of touch with reality.
  - evanmoran 4y ago
    I myself got into game programming by moding Quake and StarCraft. I’d guess a ton of people who ended up as programmers did this. So I think you’re right almost no students did anything with computers, but I’d say easily 50% of people who could code at all tried to make games and often school computers were all we had. Thankfully the computers had unbelievably bad security so it wasn’t super hard to get stuff going :)
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    I guess I didn't see the comments from others about creating games in their youth. Sorry for being so out of touch!
wlesieutre 4y ago
Back in my day it was easy: Mac OS used the 4-character "creator code" to check what applications your user could open, so you just set the creator code to a known allowed one and could run anything you want. Of course you don't have access to run ResEdit, so your bring your own copy of that on a flash drive with its creator code already fixed. "RASM" was my go-to. That was the remote access status monitor, and any user account had access to it. For the less technically inclined, you could create a custom "Launch Application" toolbar button in Apple Works (or Claris Works before that). It would give you an error that you don't have permission to launch the application, and then it would open anyway.
- MivLives 4y ago
  There was a while on our school macs where they were doing application restriction by directory instead of by executable. The Rosetta Stone folder in particular was a popular place for people to run stuff out of.
VikingCoder 4y ago
I know I'm picturing a technology will solve education problems, but... ...can't we fund some amazing games that are... educational?
- Wingman4l7 4y ago
  Where is the MECC for the 21st century? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC
- duderific 4y ago
  Kids are very smart and if they get a whiff that a game is trying to teach them something, they won't find it as interesting as a shooter or platformer. This probably varies by age, but I've got a third grade boy and I can tell you that's how he is.
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    So... can't we figure out how to make a shooter or platformer... which also teaches? And not as some clunky add-on to the side of a game... ...but like, reasonably a part of the game.
- mristin 4y ago
  Just let the kids play games in foreign languages. That's educational enough for me.
gainda 4y ago
When I was in the fifth grade we got a few G3's in our classroom. We were supposed to rotate small blocks of time throughout the week so we could have "research" time on them. I was the one who found CroMagnon Rally, Bugdom, & Nanosaur. They didn't let us use them much after that!
WalterBright 4y ago
I learned how to program as a side effect of modifying games and then programming my own.
digitallyfree 4y ago
> “One kid kept opening up game sites” said one high school teacher who asked to stay anonymous, to protect the identities of their students. “I would wait for them to open one, add it to my list of blocked websites, refresh my settings, and then they would get locked out of it. Then they would open a new tab, find a new game site, and the cycle would repeat. This happened over and over over the course of about half an hour." It strikes me as strange that the schools are playing a cat-and-mouse game rather than simply disciplining the students caught playing games or accessing these sites. Loss of privileges or so forth for violators would serve as an actual deterrent rather than encouraging students to simply find new ways to get around the block.
- gs17 4y ago
  Taking computers away means they can't use them for their intended purpose either. It's just going to be a bigger mess (if the alternative is less work, every kid will try to get banned) and end up with the headache of parents getting involved. My high school didn't punish students unless they did something really bad (someone I knew got in trouble for printing off porn).
  - throwawayfaang9 4y ago
    Or perhaps the lesson is that technology in the classroom is distracting more than it is teaching and we should use, say, paper?
- prmoustache 4y ago
  what I don't understand is why they are working with a blacklist and not whitelist? Sure kids would find ways to do something else or play the same way they use collaborative editing to chat but I don't even understand the purpose of letting them browse the whole internet during a class.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  At least at the school my kids go to, the staff is basically not allowed to discipline students for minor infractions. There were kids leaving trash out after lunch, and one of the staff had the worst offenders pick up trash before leaving the lunch room. This practice was banned because it was "degrading." That's just the most recent story, there are dozens others like it. More on topic, we got a letter from the teacher that my son was playing games. I said "why not just take the Chromebook away when that happens?" The response: oh we can't do that.
swsieber 4y ago
When I went to high school we used windows XP. I took an accounting class that used Excel and by some keen insight and nifty use of formulas and copy->paste values, I was able to get down with in class work exceptionally fast and often had a good hunk of time left over. I decided to play a SNES emulator in my spare time, on a USB stick. I had to sit towards the back. But the machines were locked down and I couldn't run any plain old .exe I had on a stick. But XP had a zip file view, and I could launch the exe from there. The last thing I needed to do was preconfigure saves and the controls to point at the correct thumb drive letter since it was different at home than it was at school. Now I've moved on the real world, but that time of mindset sticks with me. That software doesn't do what you want in an automated way? Surely there's a way to do that. Autowiring JSPs in a mixed Spring/JSP legacy java app, writing custom jenkins plugins, a custom code coverage library to performantly calculate code coverage against minified JS, etc.
rcarr 4y ago
Many aeons ago, someone at my school worked out you could download the Halo trial on to the school PCs and play anyone on any other school PC over the LAN. Entire classes of IT students were just sat playing Halo every lesson. At one point the teacher even gave up trying to get everyone to stop and just came round and watched everyone play it lol those were the days
dlevine 4y ago
I've been teaching my nephew how to code using Scratch. He told me that they blocked Scratch at school because some of the kids were using it to play games during school. Kind of a shame, because it is a great way for kids to learn how to code.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  The ability to play games is what makes it so good. It provides an incentive to learn the tool, and then an incentive to try to alter the games written in it.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  "The culture of no" demands obedience and forbids anything remotely fun. Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.
  - abrookewood 4y ago
    C'mon ... the reality is that teachers need the kids to concentrate and given a choice between doing work and playing games, the games are likely to win. Teachers are being put in an impossible situation.
    - hanselot 4y ago
      I have quite a number of fond memories of how we hid pokemon blue and gameboy emulators on every machine in our school's computer lab (from around 1999-2003). We were also the kids who were the most into computers at the time, and eventually the teacher realised that if they were on our side, they could use us to help teach the other kids basic computer skills (office, etc), by using games as the incentive. If you can't beat them, have them join you... Edit: We have reached max depth it seems, so I will just update stating that I suppose the change in the scene is quite drastic. Back when I was in school, maybe 5% of the class were computer literate. I felt like a god in that place, being able to help the "smart" students do basic things like creating an email address. The fact that the teacher doesn't see this as an opportunity is what surprises me. If the work is so boring that kids would rather play games, then use gamification to exploit this behaviour.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Maybe the problem is the reliance and substitution of glowing screen distractions for fundamental teaching. Take the devices away for most of the time.
dusted 4y ago
Back in my day, we had a room filled with 386 and 486 machines running windows 3.11, we'd bring floppies from home and boot them to dos to play, it was great and teachers encouraged it. I guess things have changed.. For one.. Kids no longer get to experience the joy of "going to the computer room".. Or later, the thrills of networked delta-force matches during lunch at the library.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  No, now they have more computer power than that entire room sitting in their pocket. Very different times.
  - dusted 3y ago
    and yet that power has been tamed, dulled, to the point where they can do even less with it
gnicholas 4y ago
> Shell Shockers doesn’t make a ton of money—Kapalka pegged its quarterly profits in the “low seven figures”—but it is profitable. Several million dollars in annual profit? That's a pretty decent haul, considering the size of the team!
gnicholas 4y ago
A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked because the word "breast" appears). Then the student presents the laptop to the teacher, who types in the exception password. Since the keylogger is running, the student can now grant himself exceptions to his heart's content. The school eventually figured this out. It's not clear how they avoid the situation however; do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices?
- casey2 4y ago
  >do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices? Yes. This is correct from both a security and educational perspective. What kind of example does the opposite set for children?
- prepend 4y ago
  I run a pihole and clients can request an exception and then I grant it on my own device. Having root type into someone else’s machine that they control is a total noob move and it’s funny the teacher fell for it. Of course since the student is using a custom machine it’s likely they have a specific ip, host name, and traffic pattern that can identify them (eg, look at the requests across 7 different classrooms and find the single student that’s in all of them before the password spreads too much). Then they can intervene and punish the kid. Keyloggers aren’t particularly clever or “hackery” and are just a social engineering hack so it’s more malicious than exploratory. But I’d hope the school doesn’t crack down too hard and instead uses it to teach kids that if you want to be clever you have to be very clever.
- kbelder 4y ago
  Don't worry about blocking it via firewall; just log traffic, make it against the rules, and punish kids when they're caught?
rzzzt 4y ago
I chuckled when reading about the "turn WiFi off so that the Chrome dino appears" method: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119141
- fatnoah 4y ago
  I posted in one of those threads, but I'm a parent that had to meet the school principal because my 4th grader "broke the school tablets to install games on them" when the actual "issue" was that he'd figured out that no WiFi == dino time!
- sneak 4y ago
  There is a Google device management setting that disables the dino game. Imagine working/studying at a place that mandates that setting. Imagine working at Google and being asked by your product manager to implement that. Imagine actually doing it instead of just quitting.
creatonez 4y ago
TIL about Eaglercraft, an illegal copy of Minecraft compiled to HTML5 using TeaVM and a custom opengl compatibility layer. That's pretty remarkable. It runs horribly and doesn't go beyond Minecraft 1.5, but it would definitely get the job done if you're trying to goof off when the teacher isn't watching. Also, if one is not concerned about being cool enough to run the real Minecraft Java edition, Minetest is a similar game that has been ported to web browsers, and it runs a lot better than eaglercraft. Mojang has also developed a clone of Minecraft Classic for HTML5, it supports invite-only multiplayer, but unfortunately for old players the lack of mass-multiplayer public servers has taken away most of the charm from Minecraft Classic, which is a surprisingly boring game without multiplayer (lava survival and classic capture the flag were some seriously fun custom game modes that we don't have anymore in the Minecraft ecosystem) --- Eaglercraft: Google it yourself, not linking because of copyright Minetest for the web: https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ Minecraft Classic HTML5: https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/
paxys 4y ago
Trying to get through hardware/software locks, content filters, firewalls, spyware etc. at school is usually the first experience kids have with "hacker" culture. For a lot of them (myself included) this eventually leads up to a real career in the tech industry. So godspeed, all you young rebels.
- JenrHywy 4y ago
  I would be more sympathetic to this line of thinking if I didn't have a 16yo who's going to be lucky to get through high school because he can't focus in class. I would have been the same at his age, if someone had plopped an internet connected device on my desk and told me to focus on school work.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    I'm sure you know this, but trouble focusing could stem from many issues, the vast majority of which can be treated. ADHD is a big one, but there's others too, some behavioural. If you haven't already seen one, I'd book an appointment with a psychiatrist and/or a psychologist. I wish my parents had done so when I was the student with trouble focusing so I could have received the help I desperately needed but never got, which made school miserable. Your kid is going to have internet connected devices around him his whole life, so figuring out how to focus in spite of them is important, and there's nothing wrong with asking specialists for help.
    - skupig 4y ago
      ADHD is a blessing and a curse. Anything you don't enjoy doing becomes very difficult, and it takes a lot of conscious effort to turn doing those things into habits so they'll stick. However, people often ignore that there is an equal and opposite side to that coin, and people with ADHD can hyperfocus to an absurd degree on tasks they enjoy. An internet connection and a desire to learn something is a powerful combination for someone who can shut out everything else in the world for several hours at a time. If you have a job you enjoy, ADHD is usually a boon. Unfortunately, high school is mostly stuff that falls into the "very difficult" category.
kleiba 4y ago
There's a big political agenda where I live to push laptops, tablets and other IT into schools, but so far no-one has been able to explain to me why this is thought to be necessary or even a good idea. The common answer that kids need to be able to us information technology as a way to prepare them for challenges of their later life is laughable: most kids are already way more tech-savvy when they enter grade 4 or so than most teachers. All I see is teachers unfit to use the medium effectively, and technical problems that prevent efficient use (wifi to restricted or too open, projector connection not working, incompatibilities between devices, etc.). To me, this seems to be fad-like activism on the side of some politicians trying to make their mark without any real plan. Oh, well, I guess that way it's like the rest of the educational system...
- Kiro 4y ago
  They might be tech-savvy but that's entirely touch-based for the majority of kids. If we think keyboards and non-touch computers will still be the medium of work in the future it's crucial that kids learn how to use them.
  - kleiba 4y ago
    But that's not what is taught in the schools around me where everything is done on tablets, too.
- mcv 4y ago
  At my kids school, blackboards have long ago been replaced by digiboards, which enables the teacher to show much more than a blackboard allows. There's also a bunch of chromebooks that are required for certain exercises. It certainly helped me when I wanted to give programming lessons there, but they're also used for language and math. One big advantage is that it can provide kids with a much more personal approach than a sheet of paper or classical lessons can, and with 20+ kids per classroom, the teacher can't give personal lessons to everybody. Not everything is on the chromebook, though; lots is still from books and paper. I think a mix is a good approach. Of course the school does first need to ensure that the tech works seamlessly. That doesn't seem to be the case in your school.

116 points by cpeterso 4y ago

I went to school like 20 years ago and I spent computing class getting around the security tool, installing Doom 95 and a SNES emulator and then playing multiplayer Street Fighter 2 and Doom 95 with my friends in the class (they both supported LAN play!) I still went to University and got a Physics degree. I think the most important thing is that the kids feel that the class is important, I felt computing class (which was basically Microsoft Office class) was a waste of time, so I just played games. But I understood that I had to study a good degree to get a good job. So in Maths, Science etc. I paid complete attention.

throwawayfaang9 4y ago
I had a similar experience. The difference is that was restricted to just computer lab. Now kids have computers on their desks during many more classes. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect they can stay focused.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

neom 4y ago

My high schools IT manager got so sick of me he eventually just gave me creds and told me if I abused his trust he'd be really disappointed in me. I never bypassed a single filter system once, just made sure whatever computer I was on was functioning, up to date, didn't need any attention and fixed anything broken. In retrospect, Weird way to get me to stop fucking around, but worked extremely well for him.

em-bee 4y ago
this is the way. my sons teacher made him class monitor, that means he had to report if other kids broke rules. i found that somewhat strange to have such a role, but the teacher said that it would stop my son from trying to break rules, because he would have to report himself.

lucumo 4y ago

Hacking school security prepares these kids for the real world, where they have to hack company security to get any shit done. (Yes, I'm salty at a lot of security theater in companies with Big Dumb Company Disease.)

ssss11 4y ago

At my high school in the nineties I found a way to escape the locked down environment via a windows dialog somehow, I’d run solitaire and everyone else was dumbfounded - good times!

physicsguy 4y ago

This is nothing new. The game N was an exe and I worked out through trial and error that if you ran the exe through a compressed file format like zip, it bypassed the school’s antivirus. That was in about 2005!

nightowl_games 4y ago

I work on games that are played on school Chromebooks and are om crazy games. Honestly I think it's a bit sad that schools are so dependent on Chromebooks. I didn't have a Chromebook at school when I went. I think I'd learn worse on a Chromebook than a teacher. We installed the halo free trial on our school computers and played blood gulch CTF in the computer lab all the time. It was awesome. Miniclip was huge on these Sun Microsystems machines we had. Good times.

seabird 4y ago

Our thing in high school was Sauerbraten one-shot-one-kill. The teacher didn't care as long as all the assignments got done. I would throw up an FTP server, everybody would download the client, and then we'd pass around the current IP and go ham. It was probably the most file management and "real" computer usage a lot of those kids ever did.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I always just befriended the teachers and computer lab supervisors by getting the work done first and then asking to play for the remaining time in the period. Even the more strict teachers always made a deal of some sort. I’d share flash drives loaded with halo combat evolved trial, Warcraft III, and a plethora of MAME games and that incentivized other students who wanted to play with me. It could be a learning tool if expectations are set right. But yeah it did lead to some kids trying to just play games all period too and would have to later fail the class and do summer packets. But it sure did lead to results for the majority.

okeuro49 4y ago

There's zero need for each child to have a Chromebook. The drive for technology in the classroom is for the benefit of manufacturers, not children. However the "Zoom classrooms" during Coronavirus have probably now made it difficult to go back.

asdasd213123 4y ago

Installing linux on my school issued Chromebook was my first experience with linux and really helped me learn all of the computer related things I wanted to learn but the school failed to give me an opportunity to.

arkaic 4y ago

This goes back even when I was in high school. I'd install SNES emulators on the windows XP machines to play super Mario world

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

The best trick we discovered was that powerpoint would run flash games if you embedded them on a slide. You could turn up to school with a powerpoint full of flash games and play them full screen on any computer. Impossible to block because there’s no web traffic.

anthk 4y ago

Give the kids the SGT puzzles web page.

0x978 4y ago

This is a great read, I recently fell down the rabbithole reading about all the different versions of minecraft that have been cracked and playable in the browser so kids can play it on school laptops, that was a great thread to follow too.

Shared404 4y ago

Speaking as a past kid trying to play video games on school laptops, I'm really grateful for the experience. Some of my first experience with reverse engineering/pentesting methodologies came from extracting flash games from websites so they could run without getting net-nannied, or learning that you could use google translate to run a makeshift web proxy. Honestly helped kickstart a lot of my learning about computers.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
I visited my high school a few years after graduating. My secret persys.sys folder (full of games) was still there. Fun times. That was the era of painfully slow (~10min) windows boot times. At one point, teenage me had a floppy with unetbootin to boot a flash drive with tinycore. I could get a browser running a solid 8min. before anyone else. Regardless of the fun, there was still a dark side. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt should not be the foundation of education.

adriand 4y ago

This relates to something that has been bugging me lately, which is as a parent I have zero parental control over the devices that our school board issues to my children. My kids have iPhones and iPads, which are part of my Apple family account, and I can both monitor what they are doing and also set limits on screen time including hours of usage and for particular apps. However, I recently became aware that my son was staying up until the wee hours of the morning scrolling on Instagram and YouTube, using his school-issued iPad, and I had no idea this was happening. I am not entirely sure how to approach this. On the one hand, I am unsympathetic to parents who might want the kind of control that prevents children from accessing information about sexuality, for example. On the other, I really don’t want my kids to have unfettered access to social media and YouTube entirely without my knowledge. Suggestions on this are welcome.

JenrHywy 4y ago
I have timeboxed access for devices controlled at the router - kids devices are blocked after their bed time, and all devices are blocked after midnight (which has been a good thing for me, too). It doesn't stop them from playing a local game, but the removal of the internet seems to break most of the desire to use devices inappropriately.
prepend 4y ago
This was a big issue for me. My school wouldn’t give me visibility into the laptop, they wouldn’t let me set screen time controls, wouldn’t let me tune content filters when they were out of school, wouldn’t let me install apps that I purchased, wouldn’t let kids message parents, and wanted me to sign these blanket “we can capture all data, including camera and microphone, sell it to whomever we want, and do whatever we want with it” waivers. Aside from teaching kids to be slaves to sysadmins and kind of crushing the coolest part of computers, they were basically making kids take care of these expensive bricks. And that’s a lot of work for an 8 year old. I think it’s more due to stupidity than any agenda, but still not something I want to be involved with. I bought cheap refurbed macbookairs that sync to screen time controls with other devices, have pretty decent privacy controls, I have root school doesn’t, they can message me and other family members, and the battery lasts two days. The school didn’t like it, but I had to make a stink and said either this or do special paper assignments. My kids were embarrassed but now appreciate just putting their laptop into their backpack instead of laptop plus charger and charging it all day. The school still issues their laptops some days for exams that will only run on their equipment. Whatever that means.

more_corn 4y ago

I got my start in computers figuring out how to play games on school computers. No class or degree could have taught me as much or been as valuable for my career. Educators shouldn’t try too har to win this arms race. Losing is also winning.

sharkweek 4y ago

As with many here I'm sure, during "computer lab" I was often done with assignments quite quickly all through school. The teachers rarely had any extra work to assign me so they pretty much gave me carte blanche to use my time however I wanted as long as it was on the computer. Great memories of trying to skirt school "blockers" in order to get to gaming websites in high school (this would have been in the early 00s). Glad to see this spirit is still alive and well and probably even moreso now than ever.

croutonwagon 4y ago
I once got suspended because I figured out how to bypass my schools lockdown policies on the computers in the lab and wouldnt tell them how i did it. (Hint: i learned they kept the "bypass" code in clear text in the registry, and later simply killed the processes from a command prompt with a batch file). I also had a small apache server and ftp box i would tunnel though or get executables from i wanted to play (like pinball, the monsters blocked pinball). Since it was the very early days of the internet my morning routine generally consisted of waiting for folks to leave, firing up the server and taking over the fax line for the day and getting the IP before heading off to school. I used a scheduler (probably cron, i dont remember) to bring it all down around 3pm before my parents got home.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Did they ever notice anything amiss with the phone bill?
  - croutonwagon 4y ago
    My pops was in sales. The fax line itself was a write off. That said, at one point he told a colleague to fax him something and he would pick it up at home and it was busy, which got me busted. Mostly the fax line was used then for him to send his receipt scans into accounting though. I was grounded for that as well. But it was also near/around the time that broadband/docsis was rolling out so they moved to it at some point soon after. My tech inept dad was what got me into tech honestly. He had a nack for turning off the computer by just holding the power button back in the windows 95 days. Eventually he corrupted the thing, blamed me and forced me to "fix" it with gateway support. I ended up searching up how to install an OS at the school lab, and just re-installed windows for him and stopped using a computer at home until i could get my own.

butlike 4y ago

This game of cat-and-mouse has existed for at least as long as I've been in school (21 years ago). Back then it was calculator games, finding an unblocked flash site game, or booting games off USBs. One of the best weeks ever was when we got Unreal Tournament (the original) to boot off USBs and work on the LAN. ~20 person in-class deathmatch games were wild.

surgical_fire 4y ago

Ahh, reminds me of the old days playing Doom in my school's computer lab. Good times.

sonzohan 4y ago

Good time for me to finish my DEFCON talk: Spoofing UEFI to play Fortnite on a Chromebook at 60FPS :)

themikejr 4y ago

So many good memories here, like making a website that curated flash games on unblocked domains and sharing floppy disks with emulators and a ROM or two.

timw4mail 4y ago

I kind of miss the days of school-sanctioned educational games, like those from MECC / The Learning Company. Of course the quality varied, but it made sense as a reward for finishing an assignment, where it could still be fun, but still be educational.

soupfordummies 4y ago
Playing Gizmos and Gadgets on the old IBMs token-ring'd together at school was where it all began for me and computers :) EDIT: One teacher even had an Apple II with "Touch the Target" Really makes me feel old thinking about it now-- it wasn't really THAT long ago but then again I guess it was.
RheingoldRiver 4y ago
I truly miss Number Munchers haha. We played until the game crashed because the computer running it ran out of memory. Somewhere around n=13 for the prime number version (the only version worth playing). Probably because at that point there were too many monsters on the board.

amflare 4y ago

Good for them. As long as it's not dangerous, I'm on the side of the kids on this one. And it looks like there are plenty of adults supervising the situation to keep it reasonably safe (it is the internet after all). The kids are going to learn a lot of useful skills and develop a fascination with computers that will stay with them for years if not their whole lives.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

My generation was writing games on school computers. Now they struggle to play them. Kids these days! Happy to consume content endlessly. It has to mean something. { Old man shakes his cane at young people. }

spiderice 4y ago
What percentage of your generation was actually writing games on school computers? 0.1%? If that. That number is definitely higher today, given that they have computer programming classes in schools now. I get that you're trying to make a self aware joke about your comment with the old man shaking his cane. But this comment really is completely out of touch with reality.
- evanmoran 4y ago
  I myself got into game programming by moding Quake and StarCraft. I’d guess a ton of people who ended up as programmers did this. So I think you’re right almost no students did anything with computers, but I’d say easily 50% of people who could code at all tried to make games and often school computers were all we had. Thankfully the computers had unbelievably bad security so it wasn’t super hard to get stuff going :)
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I guess I didn't see the comments from others about creating games in their youth. Sorry for being so out of touch!

wlesieutre 4y ago

Back in my day it was easy: Mac OS used the 4-character "creator code" to check what applications your user could open, so you just set the creator code to a known allowed one and could run anything you want. Of course you don't have access to run ResEdit, so your bring your own copy of that on a flash drive with its creator code already fixed. "RASM" was my go-to. That was the remote access status monitor, and any user account had access to it. For the less technically inclined, you could create a custom "Launch Application" toolbar button in Apple Works (or Claris Works before that). It would give you an error that you don't have permission to launch the application, and then it would open anyway.

MivLives 4y ago
There was a while on our school macs where they were doing application restriction by directory instead of by executable. The Rosetta Stone folder in particular was a popular place for people to run stuff out of.

VikingCoder 4y ago

I know I'm picturing a technology will solve education problems, but... ...can't we fund some amazing games that are... educational?

Wingman4l7 4y ago
Where is the MECC for the 21st century? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC
duderific 4y ago
Kids are very smart and if they get a whiff that a game is trying to teach them something, they won't find it as interesting as a shooter or platformer. This probably varies by age, but I've got a third grade boy and I can tell you that's how he is.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  So... can't we figure out how to make a shooter or platformer... which also teaches? And not as some clunky add-on to the side of a game... ...but like, reasonably a part of the game.
mristin 4y ago
Just let the kids play games in foreign languages. That's educational enough for me.

gainda 4y ago

When I was in the fifth grade we got a few G3's in our classroom. We were supposed to rotate small blocks of time throughout the week so we could have "research" time on them. I was the one who found CroMagnon Rally, Bugdom, & Nanosaur. They didn't let us use them much after that!

WalterBright 4y ago

I learned how to program as a side effect of modifying games and then programming my own.

digitallyfree 4y ago

> “One kid kept opening up game sites” said one high school teacher who asked to stay anonymous, to protect the identities of their students. “I would wait for them to open one, add it to my list of blocked websites, refresh my settings, and then they would get locked out of it. Then they would open a new tab, find a new game site, and the cycle would repeat. This happened over and over over the course of about half an hour." It strikes me as strange that the schools are playing a cat-and-mouse game rather than simply disciplining the students caught playing games or accessing these sites. Loss of privileges or so forth for violators would serve as an actual deterrent rather than encouraging students to simply find new ways to get around the block.

gs17 4y ago
Taking computers away means they can't use them for their intended purpose either. It's just going to be a bigger mess (if the alternative is less work, every kid will try to get banned) and end up with the headache of parents getting involved. My high school didn't punish students unless they did something really bad (someone I knew got in trouble for printing off porn).
- throwawayfaang9 4y ago
  Or perhaps the lesson is that technology in the classroom is distracting more than it is teaching and we should use, say, paper?
prmoustache 4y ago
what I don't understand is why they are working with a blacklist and not whitelist? Sure kids would find ways to do something else or play the same way they use collaborative editing to chat but I don't even understand the purpose of letting them browse the whole internet during a class.
aidenn0 4y ago
At least at the school my kids go to, the staff is basically not allowed to discipline students for minor infractions. There were kids leaving trash out after lunch, and one of the staff had the worst offenders pick up trash before leaving the lunch room. This practice was banned because it was "degrading." That's just the most recent story, there are dozens others like it. More on topic, we got a letter from the teacher that my son was playing games. I said "why not just take the Chromebook away when that happens?" The response: oh we can't do that.

swsieber 4y ago

When I went to high school we used windows XP. I took an accounting class that used Excel and by some keen insight and nifty use of formulas and copy->paste values, I was able to get down with in class work exceptionally fast and often had a good hunk of time left over. I decided to play a SNES emulator in my spare time, on a USB stick. I had to sit towards the back. But the machines were locked down and I couldn't run any plain old .exe I had on a stick. But XP had a zip file view, and I could launch the exe from there. The last thing I needed to do was preconfigure saves and the controls to point at the correct thumb drive letter since it was different at home than it was at school. Now I've moved on the real world, but that time of mindset sticks with me. That software doesn't do what you want in an automated way? Surely there's a way to do that. Autowiring JSPs in a mixed Spring/JSP legacy java app, writing custom jenkins plugins, a custom code coverage library to performantly calculate code coverage against minified JS, etc.

rcarr 4y ago

Many aeons ago, someone at my school worked out you could download the Halo trial on to the school PCs and play anyone on any other school PC over the LAN. Entire classes of IT students were just sat playing Halo every lesson. At one point the teacher even gave up trying to get everyone to stop and just came round and watched everyone play it lol those were the days

dlevine 4y ago

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

anothernewdude 4y ago
The ability to play games is what makes it so good. It provides an incentive to learn the tool, and then an incentive to try to alter the games written in it.
1letterunixname 4y ago
"The culture of no" demands obedience and forbids anything remotely fun. Lazy pencil pushers kill kids' curiosity before it begins, footgunning their entire purpose for being.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  C'mon ... the reality is that teachers need the kids to concentrate and given a choice between doing work and playing games, the games are likely to win. Teachers are being put in an impossible situation.
  - hanselot 4y ago
    I have quite a number of fond memories of how we hid pokemon blue and gameboy emulators on every machine in our school's computer lab (from around 1999-2003). We were also the kids who were the most into computers at the time, and eventually the teacher realised that if they were on our side, they could use us to help teach the other kids basic computer skills (office, etc), by using games as the incentive. If you can't beat them, have them join you... Edit: We have reached max depth it seems, so I will just update stating that I suppose the change in the scene is quite drastic. Back when I was in school, maybe 5% of the class were computer literate. I felt like a god in that place, being able to help the "smart" students do basic things like creating an email address. The fact that the teacher doesn't see this as an opportunity is what surprises me. If the work is so boring that kids would rather play games, then use gamification to exploit this behaviour.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Maybe the problem is the reliance and substitution of glowing screen distractions for fundamental teaching. Take the devices away for most of the time.

dusted 4y ago

Back in my day, we had a room filled with 386 and 486 machines running windows 3.11, we'd bring floppies from home and boot them to dos to play, it was great and teachers encouraged it. I guess things have changed.. For one.. Kids no longer get to experience the joy of "going to the computer room".. Or later, the thrills of networked delta-force matches during lunch at the library.

abrookewood 4y ago
No, now they have more computer power than that entire room sitting in their pocket. Very different times.
- dusted 3y ago
  and yet that power has been tamed, dulled, to the point where they can do even less with it

gnicholas 4y ago

> Shell Shockers doesn’t make a ton of money—Kapalka pegged its quarterly profits in the “low seven figures”—but it is profitable. Several million dollars in annual profit? That's a pretty decent haul, considering the size of the team!

gnicholas 4y ago

A school IT specialist told me about a clever student hack. Their school blocks all sorts of traffic, but teachers can allow exceptions via a password. One student installed a keylogger onto his BYOD laptop (many schools allow kids to bring their own, or use a mediocre school-provided device), and then made up a plausible excuse to hit the firewall (e.g., doing a report on anatomy, but innocuous site was blocked because the word "breast" appears). Then the student presents the laptop to the teacher, who types in the exception password. Since the keylogger is running, the student can now grant himself exceptions to his heart's content. The school eventually figured this out. It's not clear how they avoid the situation however; do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices?

casey2 4y ago
>do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices? Yes. This is correct from both a security and educational perspective. What kind of example does the opposite set for children?
prepend 4y ago
I run a pihole and clients can request an exception and then I grant it on my own device. Having root type into someone else’s machine that they control is a total noob move and it’s funny the teacher fell for it. Of course since the student is using a custom machine it’s likely they have a specific ip, host name, and traffic pattern that can identify them (eg, look at the requests across 7 different classrooms and find the single student that’s in all of them before the password spreads too much). Then they can intervene and punish the kid. Keyloggers aren’t particularly clever or “hackery” and are just a social engineering hack so it’s more malicious than exploratory. But I’d hope the school doesn’t crack down too hard and instead uses it to teach kids that if you want to be clever you have to be very clever.
kbelder 4y ago
Don't worry about blocking it via firewall; just log traffic, make it against the rules, and punish kids when they're caught?

rzzzt 4y ago

I chuckled when reading about the "turn WiFi off so that the Chrome dino appears" method: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119141

fatnoah 4y ago
I posted in one of those threads, but I'm a parent that had to meet the school principal because my 4th grader "broke the school tablets to install games on them" when the actual "issue" was that he'd figured out that no WiFi == dino time!
sneak 4y ago
There is a Google device management setting that disables the dino game. Imagine working/studying at a place that mandates that setting. Imagine working at Google and being asked by your product manager to implement that. Imagine actually doing it instead of just quitting.

creatonez 4y ago

TIL about Eaglercraft, an illegal copy of Minecraft compiled to HTML5 using TeaVM and a custom opengl compatibility layer. That's pretty remarkable. It runs horribly and doesn't go beyond Minecraft 1.5, but it would definitely get the job done if you're trying to goof off when the teacher isn't watching. Also, if one is not concerned about being cool enough to run the real Minecraft Java edition, Minetest is a similar game that has been ported to web browsers, and it runs a lot better than eaglercraft. Mojang has also developed a clone of Minecraft Classic for HTML5, it supports invite-only multiplayer, but unfortunately for old players the lack of mass-multiplayer public servers has taken away most of the charm from Minecraft Classic, which is a surprisingly boring game without multiplayer (lava survival and classic capture the flag were some seriously fun custom game modes that we don't have anymore in the Minecraft ecosystem) --- Eaglercraft: Google it yourself, not linking because of copyright Minetest for the web: https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ https://minetest.dustlabs.io/ Minecraft Classic HTML5: https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/

paxys 4y ago

Trying to get through hardware/software locks, content filters, firewalls, spyware etc. at school is usually the first experience kids have with "hacker" culture. For a lot of them (myself included) this eventually leads up to a real career in the tech industry. So godspeed, all you young rebels.

JenrHywy 4y ago
I would be more sympathetic to this line of thinking if I didn't have a 16yo who's going to be lucky to get through high school because he can't focus in class. I would have been the same at his age, if someone had plopped an internet connected device on my desk and told me to focus on school work.
- notRobot 4y ago
  I'm sure you know this, but trouble focusing could stem from many issues, the vast majority of which can be treated. ADHD is a big one, but there's others too, some behavioural. If you haven't already seen one, I'd book an appointment with a psychiatrist and/or a psychologist. I wish my parents had done so when I was the student with trouble focusing so I could have received the help I desperately needed but never got, which made school miserable. Your kid is going to have internet connected devices around him his whole life, so figuring out how to focus in spite of them is important, and there's nothing wrong with asking specialists for help.
  - skupig 4y ago
    ADHD is a blessing and a curse. Anything you don't enjoy doing becomes very difficult, and it takes a lot of conscious effort to turn doing those things into habits so they'll stick. However, people often ignore that there is an equal and opposite side to that coin, and people with ADHD can hyperfocus to an absurd degree on tasks they enjoy. An internet connection and a desire to learn something is a powerful combination for someone who can shut out everything else in the world for several hours at a time. If you have a job you enjoy, ADHD is usually a boon. Unfortunately, high school is mostly stuff that falls into the "very difficult" category.

kleiba 4y ago

There's a big political agenda where I live to push laptops, tablets and other IT into schools, but so far no-one has been able to explain to me why this is thought to be necessary or even a good idea. The common answer that kids need to be able to us information technology as a way to prepare them for challenges of their later life is laughable: most kids are already way more tech-savvy when they enter grade 4 or so than most teachers. All I see is teachers unfit to use the medium effectively, and technical problems that prevent efficient use (wifi to restricted or too open, projector connection not working, incompatibilities between devices, etc.). To me, this seems to be fad-like activism on the side of some politicians trying to make their mark without any real plan. Oh, well, I guess that way it's like the rest of the educational system...

Kiro 4y ago
They might be tech-savvy but that's entirely touch-based for the majority of kids. If we think keyboards and non-touch computers will still be the medium of work in the future it's crucial that kids learn how to use them.
- kleiba 4y ago
  But that's not what is taught in the schools around me where everything is done on tablets, too.
mcv 4y ago
At my kids school, blackboards have long ago been replaced by digiboards, which enables the teacher to show much more than a blackboard allows. There's also a bunch of chromebooks that are required for certain exercises. It certainly helped me when I wanted to give programming lessons there, but they're also used for language and math. One big advantage is that it can provide kids with a much more personal approach than a sheet of paper or classical lessons can, and with 20+ kids per classroom, the teacher can't give personal lessons to everybody. Not everything is on the chromebook, though; lots is still from books and paper. I think a mix is a good approach. Of course the school does first need to ensure that the tech works seamlessly. That doesn't seem to be the case in your school.