Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops
Geometry Spot is a simple-looking website that, on the surface, is exactly what it advertises: a place to learn more about a form of mathematics that haunts many high school students. “Why are compasses needed in geometry?” reads one article. “What is plane geometry?” reads another. But on the fringes of the website, tucked away in the upper right corner, is a link marked “activities.” Clicking on activities reveals Geometry Spot’s secret underbelly: it’s a website where kids can play a mixture of legal and legally dubious video games at school.
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.
