I have quite a number of fond memories of how we hid pokemon blue and gameboy emulators on every machine in our school's computer lab (from around 1999-2003).

We were also the kids who were the most into computers at the time, and eventually the teacher realised that if they were on our side, they could use us to help teach the other kids basic computer skills (office, etc), by using games as the incentive.

If you can't beat them, have them join you...

Edit: We have reached max depth it seems, so I will just update stating that I suppose the change in the scene is quite drastic. Back when I was in school, maybe 5% of the class were computer literate. I felt like a god in that place, being able to help the "smart" students do basic things like creating an email address.

The fact that the teacher doesn't see this as an opportunity is what surprises me. If the work is so boring that kids would rather play games, then use gamification to exploit this behaviour.

I don’t see how that applies here. It’s not just a handful of kids that are most into computers that would rather use their devices to play games at school than do school work.

Same era and outcome from our computer shenanigans. We ended up being enlisted to set up new computer labs etc. We even got some of the old network hardware "gifted" to us, which eventually let us run lan parties.

In a little Aussie country town, getting computers linked together was a huge boon to our gaming horizons.

I think the premise here is that curiosity is the source of learning. Without it, students are just going through the motions. Learning becomes a form of drudgery. Cleverness emerges as method of solving the meta-problem of institutionalism. Švejk-like behavior becomes the norm where passionate learning could have been cultivated.

Under these premises, teachers in standardized environments are already in an impossible situation.