I don't get it. I was never this stupid as a kid.

Edit: thank you for explaining to me that many of you were that stupid. I guess I never hung around any of you.

Youthful rebellion transcends technology.

Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?

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 Pop!OS 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.

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.

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...

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

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.

We did it for the love of the game and not to impress strangers

Is there a better option schools should be buying at a similar price point?

I was. When the bell would ring and the halls were hectic I would put popcorn in the communal microwave and put like 20 min and leave and sometimes nobody would notice till it catches fire

I almost burned down the school a couple times

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.

Hopefully you're less of a piece of shit now

Woah

Dude I was like 12 and severely bullied haha I'm a grown up now with a mortgage and a job

If this were an unbiased and honest article; then it would read “Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for social clout.” The subtle message, in this article, is TikTok = bad, which is illogical because events such as this will occur regardless of platform or even lack of a platform. It will ALWAYS happen. The question is how to mitigate these events as much as possible, because it’s impossible to completely eradicate “kids doing X for social clout.” It’s a part of learning and being human.

Yes but without tik tok this is a kid or two being stupid and charged a couple hundred at one school. I think we had 3 kids today at school destroy their laptops.

You can replace TikTok with any social media platform. That’s why this argument is illogical in that it blames TikTok.

I don’t remember Friendster causing mayhem like this.

Lemmy seems to not be spreading challenges either.

You have a point, but TikTok has a unique power in this moment.

And if the students did see it on TikTok, then it’s factual, specific, reporting.

TikTok is at the forefront of designing algorithms that optimize for this sort of situation. Reddit isn’t. YouTube does not appear to be. They have their own issues, but it’s not exactly this sort of optimization.

VRChat is another social network not optimized around incentivizing this mimicking and reposting behavior.

Snapchat is not built around this sort of algorithm either.

I used to be a teacher in the 2010s. I remember boys having this ghost pepper challenge they would do that would put them in literal tears.

I never stopped them. Some just have to learn through experience that being an idiot to impress your buds isn't going to result in a good time for you.

Pinebook Pro

That’s, like, a normal logical one. It’s actually food, it’s spicy. It makes sense to compete to see who can handle the spicy food. This is independently invented every day.

Stealing faucets from public bathrooms? That’s not a normal logical one. That’s a devious lick, and something invented to be highly memetic and propelled by a highly optimized algorithm that incentivizes recency, novelty, and dopamine hacking. It even effectively had a brand name!