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Re:Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront thei... by rootusrootus on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @03:24PM (#29717651)
In a computer class in the 90s, it would actually have made some sense. Schools have never had good IT staff, and it was easy to screw things up accidentally. Hell, in '94 I was in USAF tech school and watched a guy answer yes to the "WARNING: This will remove all data on non-removable disk drive C:" prompt not 30 seconds after the teacher explicitly said that getting that message meant you had mistyped. Allegedly an adult, and actually a pretty smart guy, but still managed to render that particular workstation unusable for a while.

Today, the school uses disposable VMs which are built on demand and nothing the student does can render them inoperable. And Chromebooks that are similarly unkillable. Different world now than 25 years ago, for sure. My kids' school gives the students wide latitude to screw up.

Re:Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront thei... by adamrezich on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @03:44PM (#29717897)
reasonably fair assessment, but the problem with Chromebooks is that they're basically glorified smartphones as opposed to desktop PCs, in that they're consumption devices as opposed to creative devices. sure you can get various chrome extensions (presumably not on these school Chromebooks though) that let you get part of the way there—I passed my first semester of CS using only a Chromebook with the Secure Shell extension to remote into my linux box at home—but by and large the era of everyone having the untapped creative power of a cheap commercial desktop PC in their home is kind of over now, and in my opinion we largely squandered that wonderful time by not encouraging more young people to play around with them creatively.