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The whole "browser game" industry is built on this phenomenon. It's about getting kids on school laptops mindlessly looping on something while shoving ads in th

The whole "browser game" industry is built on this phenomenon. It's about getting kids on school laptops mindlessly looping on something while shoving ads in their face. Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.

johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.
- lurkshark 7mo ago
  TurnItIn.com was starting to be a thing when I was in high school. I found out it didn’t sanitize the papers you upload and had no CSRF protection, so I could upload a doc with inline JavaScript to hit the change-password and logout APIs. Was pretty impactful for my education, just not in the intended way
zdragnar 7mo ago
What? Browser games were half of what made flash popular back in the day before laptops were even a normal consumer device. You're spot on with classrooms not needing tech though. They add complications and distractions on top of an already difficult task.
- bitmasher9 7mo ago
  Flash was founded in 1993, and while desktops were much more popular laptops were indeed a product sold to consumers
- andai 7mo ago
  I grew up in the 2000s and I remember almost everyone in the computer lab would be playing Flash games, until someone came in and yelled at us because it wasn't "educational" enough. They almost let us play RuneScape (something something medieval history?) until they saw me firebolt a rat and declared it unacceptably violent. I visited my old school once, a few years after graduating, and was startled to see many people on their laptops in the hallways. I guess they had become required. I had graduated right around the time smartphones came out, and we didn't have laptops either. (You'd see a laptop at school occasionally but it was a rare sight.) I'm glad the fanciest thing I had was a TI-84, because it got me to spend most of my time socializing, which I think was pretty good for my development.

johnnyanmac 7mo ago

Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.

lurkshark 7mo ago
TurnItIn.com was starting to be a thing when I was in high school. I found out it didn’t sanitize the papers you upload and had no CSRF protection, so I could upload a doc with inline JavaScript to hit the change-password and logout APIs. Was pretty impactful for my education, just not in the intended way

zdragnar 7mo ago

What? Browser games were half of what made flash popular back in the day before laptops were even a normal consumer device. You're spot on with classrooms not needing tech though. They add complications and distractions on top of an already difficult task.

bitmasher9 7mo ago
Flash was founded in 1993, and while desktops were much more popular laptops were indeed a product sold to consumers
andai 7mo ago
I grew up in the 2000s and I remember almost everyone in the computer lab would be playing Flash games, until someone came in and yelled at us because it wasn't "educational" enough. They almost let us play RuneScape (something something medieval history?) until they saw me firebolt a rat and declared it unacceptably violent. I visited my old school once, a few years after graduating, and was startled to see many people on their laptops in the hallways. I guess they had become required. I had graduated right around the time smartphones came out, and we didn't have laptops either. (You'd see a laptop at school occasionally but it was a rare sight.) I'm glad the fanciest thing I had was a TI-84, because it got me to spend most of my time socializing, which I think was pretty good for my development.