Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout

I wish we lived in a world where they're doing it because they don't want locked-down toys issued by an evil corporation. But of course that's not the reason.
P.S. proprietary software should be illegal in education. Full stop.
- I suppose the question would be the alternative.
  Note the devices actively discouraging offline save is a huge asset to schools, since kids screw up a lot, forget their devices and need loaners to get through a day and such. Extra bonus if the device can't be too fun, to avoid them being overly used at home and get broken more.So Chromebook is desirable because they suck so much.

Man I'm so sorry to my highschool Chromebook. They gave me that shit in yr seven and I was incapable of keeping things in one piece at that age. I think every key had been taken off by the end of the year and there were several holes in the outer casing.

Google didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
To be fair, I don't really see why they should. Chances are they didn't factor in that level of stupidity when designing those things.

Well, maybe a school-issued computer should be designed differently than a consumer device.
Maybe such things should be considered beforehand.
In industrial ergonomics you are supposed to, ideally, present a worker with a few buttons with abundantly clear results of pressing them and no forbidden combinations leading to unexpected\undefined\dangerous results.
Kids sticking things into what's given to them are not an unexpected event. I'd say kids doing that are better than kids not doing that. And if it's expected, then this is almost entrapment.
Oh, oh, OH, you can't just put a consumer device with a web browser with Google and MS and Apple shit into schools then? No kickbacks from those companies? So fucking sad.
Forcing a kid to wear around a centrally managed device with a microphone and a camera makes me want to vomit. That should be illegal as many other things. It's a disgusting world.
These should be military-level (by resilience to attempts to throw them out of the window, sink them in the water, overheat them and so on) devices with something like FreeDOS+OpenGEM. That's by far enough to run school programs. If you think it's not, then you are possessed by collective delusions, that's a thing in crowd psychology, so drink a glass of water, listen to cars\birds, look at the sky and answer which fundamentally new tasks you need to solve as compared to having year 1999 Internet (as in open a static webpage, follow links, send forms), WordPerfect and Basic. Especially at school.
We use axes, knives, hammers and screwdrivers and other stuff to do things, more or less as they existed 300 years ago, when we are not professionals, who of course use power tools.
- Unsure why this has downvotes and not more conversation, it's not that hot of a take and downvotes don't mean anything here.
- That's not cheap. Schools can't afford that. The kids know better.
  
  That can be as cheap as Chromebook. Expenses at reliability are partially redeemed by no need for such complexity and computing power.

Wouldn't the port get shutdown/disabled if you try to overload it?
- the wise committee who designed such ports made the directly access the rest of motherboard and CPU

TikTok is poison for the mind.
- It literally shrinks your brain with excessive usage.

It’d be a crying shame if the students were required to complete the school year with physical books and a notebook.
- Normally that's exactly what they would do if enough students destroyed their computers to blow through the loaners. The frustrating thing is this is happening right when schools are set to do state testing and state testing is mostly online now. This requires every student in the building to have a device at the same time. Normally all the loaners would be for kids who forgot theirs that day.

Sadly, this makes me miss when people pretended to slip and fall at the grocery store so they could throw milk jugs in the air and make a mess.

the so-called Chromebook Challenge includes students sticking things into Chromebook ports to short-circuit the system.
I am rather surprised that works. I thought any modern device would have overload protection in place. I think I even remember accidentally tripping it on some device, but it would just reset after reboot.
I also tried to see the max output current of my previous phone this way. Load it up till the protection trips. Result: Stable up to 2.1A, tripped at 2.5A.
Oh, yeah. A Xiaomi phone charger I have also shuts down if I either overload it or immediately load it near max rating rather than gradually increase the load.
- People used to do this in the UK with their ZX spectrums.
- once put usb-c in a usb-a port and my desktop pc performed an immediate reboot without any permanent harm…
- Maybe they are poking a hole in the lithium battery

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.
- Ditto. I grew up helping fix VCR by replacing displaced bands and gears. I knew to be careful not the let the magic smoke come out. Bad genie!
- Are you sure? Kids are pretty stupid.
  
  I never intentionally destroyed expensive electronics to "try to impress" anyone in real life, let alone online (although that didn't quite exist yet).
  So, yeah, I'm sure.
- 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.
  
  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!
  
  Eating a spicy pepper is just harmless fun. I'd join in that activity today.
- Same, but I had classmates who were.
- I was pretty stupid
- You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
- Some of my shenanigans definitely involved breaking electronics
- 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
  
  Hopefully you're less of a piece of shit now

Perhaps it's more like "Kids short-circuiting school issued chromebooks because of excessive surveillance."
...but probably not (or at least, not entirely) because many kids are dumb.
source: was a dumb kid.
- Nah, before Chromebooks we'd vandalize the text books and desk.
  
  I would take the balls from mice
  And also computer mice
- Excessive surveillance? It’s school property lol
  
  It's school property with a camera and microphone in their homes lol

Youthful rebellion transcends technology.
Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?
- Desks are cheaper, and the hole only slightly impairs functionality.
  
  I'm not so sure about cheaper. A quick google search shows the desks I used in school are priced around $400-$600 depending on type (different subjects had different desks), whereas the Chromebooks are around $250. I definitely agree with your second point, though.
  
  They also don't release magic smoke. All my homies hate vandalizing desks.
- Drilling a hole in your desk doesn't lead to cancer.
- Pen is less likely to start a fire and or create toxic smoke.
- We did it for the love of the game and not to impress strangers
  
  Bullshit you did it to impress the other nosepickers, same reason these kids are doing it.
- I've never done that either. The fuck? did you eat paint as a kid?
- Thank you, it's relieving to see that some people don't fall for the "kids today" bullshit

As I age I find myself feeling more and more like the cool step-dad or uncle.
Y'know I hate everything Chromebooks stand for. "You get 'em, kid. Now how about we get some pizza?"

Aren't the families responsible for the damages?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  What does "cut trail" mean in this context? Do you mean literally going to walking trails and maintaining them? Is there precident for that?
  
  *Junior High

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.
- Yeah, could have been called “kids are learning how circuits work thanks to TikTok trend” and suddenly the story has a whole other meaning

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 PopOS 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.
- I agree but I'm not sure why specifically popos though
  
  Pop!OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a custom GNOME desktop.
  It is designed to have a minimal amount of clutter on the desktop without distractions in order to allow the user to focus on work.
  This distro was also designed with security and privacy in mind.
  So students can more easily focus on their work while also being more secure and private while using an easy to use interface, I know it's not the only one but its a good one!
  https://system76.com/pop/security/
- Yeah, no worry about the lithium fires. Fuck those chromebooks.
- I'm with you, but that's not the reason these kids are doing this. It's because they are idiots.

Good, chromebooks suck.
- What do you suggest children use instead?

Just got a notification about this from my kids school district in Northern CA.

Behold the next generation of voters.
- It's how the US got Trump. The "Trump Train" was a meme, first.

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
- Is there a better option schools should be buying at a similar price point?
  
  I would ask what value chromebooks add to education?
  We are not teaching kids to do anything with them other than consume Google and Adobe services.
  It’s no better than schools were when I was in school where we used windows and mainly learned to consume Microsoft products.
  
  Pinebook Pro

What does "clout" mean?
- Another word for fame
  
  Also reputation
  
  Thanks
  
  more like a rap sheet
- https://www.dictionary.com/browse/clout
  Are you not a native English speaker? It's not an uncommon word.
  
  Nope.
  It's the first time I've seen this word.
- Net Cred
- Yeah basically it's like good aura

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...

Just gotta get some of that Magic Smoke.

We live in hell