the so-called Chromebook Challenge includes students sticking things into Chromebook ports to short-circuit the system.
I am rather surprised that works. I thought any modern device would have overload protection in place. I think I even remember accidentally tripping it on some device, but it would just reset after reboot.
I also tried to see the max output current of my previous phone this way. Load it up till the protection trips. Result: Stable up to 2.1A, tripped at 2.5A.Oh, yeah. A Xiaomi phone charger I have also shuts down if I either overload it or immediately load it near max rating rather than gradually increase the load.
once put usb-c in a usb-a port and my desktop pc performed an immediate reboot without any permanent harm…
Maybe they are poking a hole in the lithium battery
People used to do this in the UK with their ZX spectrums.
How about the “graduate from highschool challenge”?
Felony conviction any % speed run.
Aren’t the families responsible for the damages?
Yes they are. These 9th graders are feral though. That realization would require forethought.
Some of these kids should have been sent out to cut trail for a year between HS and Middle School.
*Junior High
What does “cut trail” mean in this context? Do you mean literally going to walking trails and maintaining them? Is there precident for that?
That was what I was referring to. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but a year in national service (beyond just the military) to do community service and gain skills in general not a new proposal. Pete Buttigieg suggested it after HS as part of his candidacy during the 2020 democratic primary.
I was having a similar conversation with my teen - out hiking and wondering how the trails were built and maintained. We talked scouting service projects and all the way back to the WPA, but have no actual info. The park is a hill so there are several rough stone stairways up to the ridge trail. They probably last years but do need attention
Occasionally you see online ideas about a year of service for every new adult and this would be a good option
This is highly dependent on the state and even the areas within a state. Here in California for instance we have the Williams Act which lays out a ton of guidance. Some of which impact students paying for things at schools. Some districts in the state view Williams Act and 1:1 Chromebook deployments as being something that the student/parents aren’t responsible for paying for even when they purposefully damage it. This can change though from region to region in the state based on how a districts legal team and its board chooses to read the law since no one so far (at least as far as I was last aware and I work in edtech) has pushed to see where it stops or starts. I’ve worked for districts that were on separate ends of that spectrum and even in the district that made parents pay for damages we still would give them a replacement and not charge them since it was added to a “tab” and only if they wanted transcripts did they have to pay.
That’s fair. In my district your insurance is covered if you qualify for assistance, but intentional damage isn’t included in insurance.
In my school we will still replace the Chromebook though (barring admin or district saying otherwise), and the financial impact will be fought by others at the district level. It’s above my pay grade.
Just got a notification about this from my kids school district in Northern CA.
We live in hell
Youthful rebellion transcends technology.
Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?
Thank you, it’s relieving to see that some people don’t fall for the “kids today” bullshit
Desks are cheaper, and the hole only slightly impairs functionality.
I’m not so sure about cheaper. A quick google search shows the desks I used in school are priced around $400-$600 depending on type (different subjects had different desks), whereas the Chromebooks are around $250. I definitely agree with your second point, though.
What sort of hole were you drilling in a desk with a pen in order to completely render the desk unusable?
i don’t know much about school desk but I can get a nice standing desk for $600. That is nuts.
Also I wonder if they sell replacement parts.
I’m sure the schools don’t pay that much for the desks (or the Chromebooks) since they buy in bulk – those are just the prices I could find for single units. I was more trying to show the difference in price, rather than exactly how much the schools spend.
Not even that, but they are simple and repairable. I remember we had these sleigh-style desks (same idea except the seat was one-piece molded plastic) that were a total of four parts (two rails, the seat and the desk top) aside from bolts/hardware, and they had a graveyard of parts to replace pieces as needed. And those desk were tough as all hell.
Sounds great, but… unfortunately, it seems impossible to tilt on the chair with those, which I see as an essential part of going to school.
Also, the heights of the chair and table seem unadjustable, and it seems the pupil is seated too far away from the desktop to actually be comfortable.
What a useless piece of piss. Yeah, at least it’s repairable, but is such a stupid piece of faulty furniture even worth repairing?
Again, that was the style and not the exact ones we had, but yeah they were all fixed position, however ours weren’t too bad. I dunno, I don’t remember anyone complaining much, I was on the taller side of my peers and fit fine while I recall even the smaller kids were alright too. Id wager a big reason they were chosen was so kids couldn’t balance on the back legs, fall back and crack dome. They were great for cracking your back!
Industrial strength furniture that can withstand decades of abuse is not cheap.
And isn’t rendered unusable by a “hole drilled by a pen”. The person comparing a desk to a Chromebook is making a ridiculous comparison.
Also, most school laptops are old. Someone did this at my school and got charged (iirc) $175 since it was the really old kind
Huh. Never realized chromebooks were priced that low.
Thanks for the correction.
Chromebooks are designed to be cheap and disposable. I’ve seen some as low as ~$100. That doesn’t mean you can’t get some very expensive ones, but since they basically only allow you to use Google and a select few apps from the play store, I don’t know why the expensive ones exist.
I got an EOL Chromebook for $50, dropped Mint on it & use it to run a 3D printer instead of a raspberry pi.
I used to have one as my primary work device for a few years. Honestly, it was surprisingly usable once you find online analogs for all typical things you do on a computer.
The biggest issue is you’d be using a free online service for some application, and then they start charging per month or the company goes under and you lose your work, so you have to keep finding new services and exporting your work to a common format that won’t disappear to a central file system like Drive diligently.
They are very cheap. We had to buy them ourselves for our kids, which at least gave choices. We settled n $400 because for the cost of the cheapest piece of shit laptop, we could get a high end Chromebook that ran circles around it: faster, much more durable, much lighter, multiple times battery life
They also don’t release magic smoke. All my homies hate vandalizing desks.
Pen is less likely to start a fire and or create toxic smoke.
I’ve never done that either. The fuck? did you eat paint as a kid?
We did it for the love of the game and not to impress strangers
Bullshit you did it to impress the other nosepickers, same reason these kids are doing it.
Yup, the nose pickers just moved online.
Drilling a hole in your desk doesn’t lead to cancer.
Fuck chromebooks anyways, Google shouldn’t be allowed to steal so much information about our youth directly from the devices they use at school. They should be using laptops with Linux installed on them, preferably PopOS to preserve the kids privacy.
I don’t condone damaging school property, although I think it’s a lesser evil to Google’s privacy practices on Chromebooks.
I’m with you, but that’s not the reason these kids are doing this. It’s because they are idiots.
They should be using Debian, the universal operating system.
Debian works too, it really doesn’t matter as long as its not windows and google Chromebook crap.
Linux distros aren’t all made the same, but they’re all pretty much the same in spirit. Tux is universal.
I personally think that Pop!OS is a user friendly distro that would be an easy introduction to Linux for students while also focusing on privacy and security with less clutter.
I agree but I’m not sure why specifically popos though
Pop!OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a custom GNOME desktop.
It is designed to have a minimal amount of clutter on the desktop without distractions in order to allow the user to focus on work.
This distro was also designed with security and privacy in mind.
So students can more easily focus on their work while also being more secure and private while using an easy to use interface, I know it’s not the only one but its a good one!
Linux mint or something fedora based are also good choices. Lots of flavors out here in the linux world.
Yeah, no worry about the lithium fires. Fuck those chromebooks.
Not even that bad, they are learning about electricity in a hands-on manner. USB standards protect against short circuits so this is over exaggerated heavily.
Fucking a computer with scissors is a way to perhaps die and/or burn down buildings, I don’t think they learn shit
Just gotta get some of that Magic Smoke.
Behold the next generation of voters.
It’s how the US got Trump. The “Trump Train” was a meme, first.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a computer programming class surrounded by clunky towers and desktops.
Suddenly, a loud popping, then one of the machines starts belching smoke like a budget fog machine. The kid using it is calmly moved to another station while the prof investigates.
Fifteen minutes later - pop. Smoke again.
Turns out the kid was jamming a paperclip into the power supply like he was playing Operation: Arson Edition.
That was his last day.
On the bright side, computers are a lot cheaper now - and kids are still dumb. So, maybe progress?
I have the same memory, except the teacher would just pop his head out from the office and tell us to knock it off. Someone managed to draw a giant line of Axe spray across the electronics desk/counter things and made a massive fireball. Nobody really got in trouble in that class.
We just pulled stupid pranks, like setting a repeating function with sound at the highest frequency in BASIC and locking the machines… on all the computers.
This seems like something they should have engineered out of a product primarily used by schoolchildren.
Engineer out the electricity?
You can design something to survive pin shorting.
They said 20 years ago. We literally had ‘use a paperclip to turn on the computer on the test bench’ as the standard practice. Designing things for people to do them wrong was very much not the style at the time.
My cousin partially set his bedroom on fire doing something very similar with the foil from chewing gum. This was in the 1980s though so no one really cared, I’m pretty sure he just got shouted at.
the worst part is expecting kids to learn about computers using a fucking Chromebook.
They’re not learning. They’re being implanted into Googles software as a service model. Get the kids on Gmail when they’re young and they’ll never use anything else.
Yep.
Same shit happened when conditioning students to use “PowerPoint” for science fairs.
The indoctrination starts young.
Yeah and then they enter the workforce and find that everyone uses outlook. Despite all of Google’s attempts I don’t know any businesses that actually use g suite mostly because Microsoft bundle O365 with everything these days so there’s no point business is going out and buying a second licence for software they essentially already have.
We’re going to have a whole generation of kids pretty soon that are going to be entering the workforce and they’re barely going to be able to operate a mouse and keyboard. Although it’s not really the Chromebook at fault this started with the damn iPads. Why were schools issuing iPads to students anyway, they have the absolute worst possible UX for note-taking.
Chromebooks aren’t replacing computer classes. They’re replacing textbooks and mimeographed handouts for a variety of classes. Most of that stuff is web based now, and Chromebooks are cheap so they’re the perfect tool for the job.
That’s like if you taught the next generation of carpenters using Fisher-Price toy tools (all sponsored by Fisher-Price, by paying huge campaign money to the politician).
When I was a middle schooler I definitely wanted to see what would happen from messing around with things like that would be like…
But I also wasn’t inundated by short form videos trying it out and encouraging me to do it myself also as part of a trend…
Good. Less spyware machines in the world.
Chromebooks are absolute garbage.
Most computers I have used over the last 15 years will disable USB power if you short out the port (working with electronics you tend to replicate the “sticking scissors into a USB port” with some regularity)
Pencil lead I am sure causes other issues though… it gets red hot and melts eventually
Is there a better option schools should be buying at a similar price point?
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I would ask what value chromebooks add to education?
We are not teaching kids to do anything with them other than consume Google and Adobe services.
It’s no better than schools were when I was in school where we used windows and mainly learned to consume Microsoft products.
Welcome fellow codger. Back in my day we had books made from real paper and we loved in. Handing in an assignment meant writing by hand in actual paper and physically handing it to the teacher.
Everything is online. My kids have had very few physical textbooks in years. “Writing a paper” means typing into a n online document. “Handing in” an assignment means dropping some sort of file into an online folder. It’s not really a matter of learning anything, but that school resources are all online and every student needs access.
Also the online services are all “free”. Yeah they might be exploited by advertising but no kid pays and no kid is locked into a commercial vendor (Google at least doesn’t charge)
I’m not entirely sure, but I found having easy access to a computer helped me with school work. I imagine these level the field a bit since perhaps not all kids have easy access to computers otherwise?
