Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops
April 27th, 2023Assuming you think it’s ok for children to have access to these devices during school (I don’t), the IT departments could easily implement domain whitelists. This means that only sites explicitly whitelisted by the administrators would be accessible by the students.
All of that said, I salute the entrepreneurial genius of the boy who makes the fake educational/gaming sites for profit.
Via: Vice:
Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.
What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.
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Geometry Spot is run by 16-year-old Jerry Klamm, who attends high school in New York. This is one of many smokescreen websites that Jerry runs, a practice that dates back to middle school. At the time, Jerry had been trying to build up a personal YouTube channel.
“I was at school,” said Jerry during a recent interview with Waypoint, “and someone said, ‘That’s a cool website, but why don’t you add games to it that we can play in school?’”
He did, and suddenly, a lot of people at Jerry’s school were visiting his site—to play games. A typical cycle would then play out, with Jerry making a website with embedded games for fellow students to play during and between class, before the school caught on and banned it.
Now in high school, Geometry Spot is the latest in that chain, a website that’s done well enough that it now includes ads, and generates what Jerry’s father, Chris Klamm, calls “real money.”
