It is my instinctive reaction that if you think you can win your students hearts and minds by eliminating distractions like this, you don't belong in education.
On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings instead of paying attention to class.
To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.
As someone working in an educational context on the university level, I certainly agree for young kids.
But at some point people need to learn how to put themselves through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach your goals (e.g. reading the datasheets, reading some specification, looking at some source text that hasn't been simplified to digestive bits by someone else, gather boring data that is needed, ...).
In my subjective observation students over the past 10 years have become less willing to put in mental footwork themselves if there is not an entertaining youtube video that lays it out for them. I work in art university, so most of the topics people will work on are entirely their own choice. But if e.g. a student wants to work with electronics, they would rather try to mimik what some guy in some youtube video did for a year (without understanding it at all), than grabbing a foundational book and work through it over the course of a month.
The latter is less instant reward and more boring work, but pays off for a long time and will allow them to judge what makes sense and what is bullshit. The former feels like the direct solution, but will leave you coming back for help whenever you deviate from that precise solution someone else made.
I have nothing against entertaining education at all, I just think that for many being able to go through the boring stuff (on their own terms) might be a valuable ability as well. And this is not about the media at all. The above example with the foundational electronics book would have worked as well if they have chosen to watch a foundational series of youtube videos as well. But these videos are not leading directly to the result.
I have seen single students who have fooled around for years with try and error in electronics without ever having the idea to learn the basics..
I feel like boring to some extent means that poor communication is happening. What you're learning when dealing with a boring subject is how to deal with something/someone that is unengaging, dense or confusing. Although this is a skill, I feel like learning the material isn't really taking place.
For example I read many, many scientific papers in college and they were all very boring. I feel like the big take away was how to deal with this type of communication medium which was dense, verbose and contextual. I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
> I guess this is an important skill but I wonder if it really has to be this way.
What is the alternative? Only learning from curated, well crafted sources?
It would be great to raise the floor of educational material. Ultimately though people will need to grow beyond well trodden paths, so they'll probably need to work through some noise to find the signal.
I think it is a good skill to have, to know that sometimes the information you truly need might exist in a shape that you cannot appreciate (yet).
Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it".
For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path.
Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space.
It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow.
I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff".
Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.
I agree that learning to work through boredom is an important skill. But I also think the internet has made it substantially less important because so much more knowledge has been made available in non-boring ways.
I work through boredom not because I like boredom and not because it's "foundational" to somebody else, but because that's the only way for me to accomplish a goal. So to the extent that somebody's particular work still requires it, I think we're going to have to find new ways to structure things to bring that experience forward in time for them.
I think the other option is to restructure things so that being bored is even less necessary. For example, the common way to think about "foundational" concepts is to structure education with a lot of boring and apparently pointless stuff up front, the promise being that it will pay off later. To me that looks like privileging the convenience and perspective of the instructor over that of the student. Can we instead swap it around so that "fundamentals" are taught in slices in close relation to purposeful activity?
As to the Montessori question, I think it depends on your understanding of boredom. My understanding is that as the student gets older, they take on larger and larger projects, so they learn how to deal with the sort of boring that comes from purposeful hard work, but not the sort of boredom that comes with blindly following authority. To me those feel pretty different, and I might more accurately call the first "tedious" rather than boring.
I think we should gamify education. Give the students a challenge who will complete the difficult electronics theory exam the quickest and you will see them making an effort.
In general, I would split the current volume of basic education into smaller subjects (with many optionals) and finer levels, and have students to make a choice how fast they want to complete them (as long as they would work towards one of these goals).
I recall a teacher creating an RPG-like learning system that tracks numbers that help them "level up" by "gaining xp" through activities that help in their weak areas.
Sorry to be lazy to not look it up, but I thought it was an interesting take on gamifying learning.
My HS CS class in 2014 was like this. It was wonderful because it took away the incarceration feeling of normal public school. If I did the work faster than everyone else correctly, I could go and do what I wanted in the school, which motivated other students to finish and motivated me to finish first. I wish other classes were like that.
The only thing close in college was profs who would let you test out of classes, and work on a self study project for the class, I loved that.
Not necessarily gamify but make it fun. I recommend 'Code' by Petzold. This book explains how computers work and has some methoids how to add numbers or build an adder yourself and it is super fun to read.
OK, really, do you want to be stuck with boring and bad textbooks and teachers to drive home the lesson, that some things are just not fun and have to be done anyways?
This can and will be done at home: brushing teeth, bathing, put on clothes, bring out the trash, wash dishes.
I have a whole bag of not fun things for my kids to do, that are not fun but have to be done anyways. Turst me, they don't need it in school too. Let learning be fun.
Sure. But, IMO, it (chatGPT) is about the quality of a first or second year uni student right now (albeit in every subject at the same time), including being confidently incorrect.
(I've not done a systematic all-subject study; this is based on the comments I've seen from experts in a mere handful of domains, plus my own knowledge in my own domain).
"""Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”""" - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
It would be an ironically Greek tragedy, if the end of human civilisation were to be caused by a (written) language model, especially given how many Κασσάνδρα-analogs we have had from (given this hypothetical outcome) Socrates to Yudkowsky.
> at some point people need to learn how to put themselves through boring mindnumbing stuff as well, because this will sometimes be part of what you need to do if you wanna reach your goals
Framing is important, and there is a huge difference when approaching something with the attitude of "toleration" compared to "determination". The value in the skill of determination, is the realisation that with it, many things can become intrinsically more interesting and rewarding the more work you put in. When you find something that clicks and try hard at it you can end up in a feedback loop, and this is the sweet spot you want everyone to find in life.
Suggesting that hard work should only be tolerated is not a fruitful path to put people on - sure some things in society like filling out paper work are inherently boring, and unfortunately the realty of current systematised education is kind of similar, but ironically nether match the reality most real cognitive or skilful work.
Perhaps this sounds more like a romantic ideal than something practical - I get that in the reality of current school environments it seems like a hopelessly subtle idea to convey in the hurricane of the massive curriculum you are trying to get them to absorb - However, ideas and wisdom can have a much longer lasting effect on a student's life than what may as well be ephemeral knowledge at that age. I think the least a teacher can do is to encourage students whenever they see a spark of interest, it doesn't matter whether or not it looks "useful" or is even tangentially part of the curriculum, because you can learn the value in the skill of determination by learning to doing anything substantially difficult, and it's a surprisingly transferable mindset.
... But regardless of this framing, to be fair to the rest of your comment which I agree with, the real contender is the new reality of the short attention span, ruined by entertainment. Even as an adult who has long learned the rewards in this skill find it being eroded if I am not careful.
Imagine people telling you that you're fucked in the head and putting you on speed because you don't like listening to incompetent cretins in a prison like environment
Any inquiry in the genre of "Why not try [obvious thing]?" is generally going to lead nowhere. You don't know what you don't know, and it can be exhausting to explain to the nth person asking too-obvious questions that their obvious question is missing experiential data or any effort at research, and then filling in those gaps.
Medication and therapy are expensive. It doesn't always work. If it works, it might not work well. If it works at all, there are often side effects. Getting into therapy is hard. Finding a therapist you click with once you get through all the hoops is even harder. Sticking with each step of the process when you have a disorder that makes sticking to things hard is hilarious once you think about it.
I dunno, I’m 36 and Adderall is the difference between “low performance dev about to get put on PIP because he doesn’t do his work” and “software engineering team lead being congratulated by higher ups on your teams performance”. Which is literally the last few years of my life’s ups and downs.
People hearing the same thing over and over can be annoying to some, but for others it’s the only thing that’ll really get through a lot of our skulls and get us to try something different.
however, it might be that someone who would actually benefit from such remediations hasn't thought of it seriously or recently (very, very common with ADHD). Stories about such things working could be useful to these folks and aren't necessarily meant to undermine the difficulties you mention.
There are some newer medications that show promise for people who've had little/no effect or bad side effects from the usual stuff, or who had trouble accessing Adderall. Suggesting that could help. Yet another "Ritalin? Therapy?" floating in the void will not.
Will the person who downvoted explain? Ritalin must be the worst stimulant I have ever taken, worse than caffeine, and amphetamines work ok but that's just speed and has bad side effects.
Doctors here are not aware of other medications and so I just smoke weed by the truckload :-)
Ritalin is one form of methylphenidate - a short-active version.
Formulations with longer dose/release profiles exist - Concerta XR and Elvanse/Vyvanse are the same active stimulant (methylphenidate), but spread over the course of ~12 hours.
Personally I've found that Concerta has a ramping up and ramping down, with peak effects kicking in around 4 hours, whereas Elvanse kicked in relatively quickly at the same constant level.
Having to take ritalin (and adderall) multiple times a day with the risk of crashing in between sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad at least here in the UK one of the first thing psychiatrists suggest trying is low dosages of the longer-acting methylphenidate derivatives.
It takes a lot of messing around with different meds and formulations to find one that works for you. It's like incredibly individual/personal; people seem to have wildly different responses to the different families of stimulants, different dosages, different delivery methods, different times of day etc etc. Takes a lot of educated effort.
It really sucks how it's so damn variable between countries or even within countries - national policies on ADHD meds and amount of knowledge your average doctor has in each country on those meds. Wildly and unhelpfully variable.
Elvanse is lisdexamphetamine no? That's speed, the good stuff :-))
I've had Concerta, Medikinet and plain Methylphenidate and they all feel the same to me, it's the same chemical after all. Feels horribly nasty and I didn't find all the variables to make much of a difference unfortunately.
The substances that I feel have the most promise unfortunately have an uphill battle in terms of acceptance. Quite hard to find material about how psychedelics relate to ADHD.
Indeed. A lot of bad teachers are ready to blame anything but themselves for their kids not paying attention in their classes.
Too many schools just end up with this mindset that the kids HAVE to listen in class, and in order for them to, we just have to somehow force them by removing ANY alternative thing they could be doing, that way they will have no choice.
And those same people wonder why the kids say school feels like prison.
To be fair, the teachers are hopelessly outgunned here. They're competing with a deep pockets industry that can develop infinitely addictive, engaging content that is also designed to be de-educational.
Trying to make successful educational media on the same playing field is hopeless. For one thing, the resources for doing that don't exist. For another, kids can instantly perceive that something "educational" is going to be slightly more boring than something purely entertaining and addictive. The playing field can't be leveled.
Third, we're really not helping them by reinforcing that the only way to learn is to be saturated in addictive media content.
Disclaimer: I'm not sure education was ever all that great, but there were people sincerely trying to make it better.
To be fair, reading the initial bug reports, the focus is heavily on "students disable the wifi and then the next class has to turn it back on, and they may be too young to understand how to do that".
In a weird way, maybe this is good. The only reason I learned what autorun.ini does, or what VB is, is because I used them to get around the school's network controls. Kids today will figure out how to enable developer mode, un-enroll their chromebooks, and play the dinosaur game. A world without challenges is a world without ingenuity.
The hardware is now locked down to the point that this isn't really possible anymore. Future generations will never get to have those kind of experiences like we did.
Most people you'll meet on HN are of the kind capable of self motivation to a high degree that makes long and involved projects possible if there's interest in something, even if it takes substantial extra learning to get there.
Thing is, I suspect most people in general aren't like that. They just sort of exist, not knowing what they even want to learn or try to avoid learning if at all possible. You can see this very clearly in university students that pick prof given bachelor thesis titles by what seems easiest vs. those that come up with their own. Or just school project work in general.
> I suspect most people in general aren't like that. They just sort of exist, not knowing what they even want to learn or try to avoid learning if at all possible.
There is a saying about this: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
So what if there are people like that? It is not like everyone must learn. If they don’t want to they don’t have to.
Well believe it or not, primary education is mandatory by law in most of the world. So they sorta have to and the system must be designed to cater to all, unfortunately.
Now we are just talking by each other. Previously you were talking about university students picking easy thesis topics. I reacted to that, and now you are talking about primary education.
I never programed a game onto my TI-8x but I somehow got a few dozen installed on there. There are different degrees of self-motivation, especially when the motivator is how boring school lectures are.
I had my septum deviated for doing similar to the above in Word 97 in the 2000s.
Must be nice to do things the way you describe, but unfortunately the process you go through in America to become a K12 teacher basically snags the sociopaths too intelligent to be cops and gives them a steady stream of narcissistic supply.
I'm glad that we didn't have "enterprise enrollment" back when I was learning computers. (I had a Tandy 1000 with a BASIC interpreter.)
The whole thread seems a lot like "concern trolling" to me. Every ChromeOS administrator knows kids can go to a website to play games, or type one into the Javascript console, but act outraged that there's a tiny easter egg in a web browser. "They're going to make us get rid of the Chromebooks if you don't turn this off!!!!11" Uh huh. I'm sure the taxpayers will want to throw away a couple million dollars worth of laptops because if you turn WiFi off you can play with a little dinosaur.
When I was in middle school, I discovered that the content filter proxy server could be bypassed: it ran on port 8080, but outside of the school's firewall. So if you found another proxy running on 8080, you could use that instead.
I found an RSS feed of proxy servers and their addresses. So I wrote a VB6 app that would pull it, set the registry key for a proxy server, open the embeddable browser in the background, and time how long it takes to load a bunch of popular sites. It would iterate through the list of servers, and finally settle on the server that had the fastest load times. When you closed the program, it would set the registry key back.
At the time, autorun.ini was still a thing. All of my friends had flash drives that would "turn off" the firewall when they plugged them in.
I was a young teenager. If you think you can stop a determined kid from bypassing your rules, you're fighting the wrong battle.
A child determined to do this (I also did it) is not the target of such a program. If you're smart enough to do that, you're probably smart enough to pass classes without much effort. Especially given the innate drive to not only discover a new way to bypass the system but also to automate it. Chances are you did well in school, especially in subjects you enjoyed, because being challenged drives you to innovate.
"If you think you can stop a determined kid" is trivializing the matter. Your average child will spend 24 hours a day melting their brain on TikTok. Not reading the ancient tomes of programmers gone by on how to better automate their bypasses. Your example actually demonstrates in a roundabout way that it's not there to stop determined adversaries who are likely self-driven enough to learn anyway. A certain, largely average, cohort of students do not have this ability, will never possess this ability, and will likely with much effort pass with middling grades. These people are highly susceptible to failing when distractions are introduced. Stopping them should be priority number 1 in any school district worth their salt.
> Also harmful for teachers that are trying to keep their students focused, not playing games
I really regret the number of things we're allowed to casually refer to as "harm". That word used to be significant to me but now carries very little weight, manifesting instead as inconvenience, frustration, or, in this case, distraction.
If teachers can be so boring that the t-rex game outcompetes them for the attention of students then the problem is teachers not the game.
I understand that not al teachers can be like Richard Feynman or Tatiana Erukhimova or Walter Lewin but surely we should expect them to be better than the t-rex game.
This is certainly harmful. Advertisers et al. have taken over the internet. There are easy dopamine hits everywhere. For example, one my relatives has a 10 year old who is glued to their phone all day watching tiktok or youtube. In this particular case it's the parent's fault, but that is not my point. At school the kids are there to learn. If this is how many kids are at home if you give them unlimited access to the internet it will harm their education. Arguing the semantics is pointless.
Right, but this is an assertion that the game harms education, which must be precipitated by unengaged students. Rather than ask, "why are students not engaged?" We instead gate their lack of engagement with boredom, which creates more problems.
School is boring. The skill to learn is how to deal with that and still survive. At such a young age you're learning the rules which is why it's hard to engage students. A classic example, using algebra to balance a checkbook, would bore students more. They don't have the ability to do any interesting geometry, no knowledge of physics (that's usually high school), etc. Chemistry is typically not taught before the middle of high school, etc. Keeping high school students engaged, from what I understand, is a different art entirely.
The only class that might be able to be made more interesting is English. The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are both snoozefests. But for other subjects the idea of "creating engagement" is more difficult. People seem to think children possess the foresight they do even though they are adults. In middle school, most of the time you can just say "this will get better in a few years if you do well here". Children lack a sense of delayed gratification. Hence the popularity of PE as a subject (aside from the health benefits) or music classes relative to other classes. Funny enough, the modern adult (still a child) also tends to lack this ability. There's nothing wrong with these classes intrinsically. They just provide an "instant" dopamine hit a developing brain is hardwired to understand.
Not everyone can afford to send their kids to a "montessori" school to have some avante garde teaching method keep them "engaged". For the rest of us, learning how to cope with something boring will be an extremely useful life skill the second you enter the real world.
This seems like a gross amount of individual perspective being passed unlabeled.
School, as it currently exists, may be boring. I remember being bored out of my mind; that didn't necessarily need to be so though. Many teachers read out of our books and could explain little else beyond the content of the book. I hated maths and Spanish as a result. Many of the teachers attracted to these subjects aren't the kind of people who should be teaching kids. Meanwhile, when I learned Chemistry I learned more about maths than I could've ever dreamed and I was captivated.
As an adult I relearned a lot of that math to succeed as a programmer and it was fun. I think, largely, we fail to meet students where they are with respect to their education. We shove everything down their throats on our schedule rather than the pace in which they can build on these subjects. The result is boredom derivative of disenchantment.
I'm not even sure what your point about Montessori education is. The teachers do not make it special. The method is what's special, which is that pace is dictated by the pupil.
I've noticed that way of framing too, and once you see it, you see it in many places, not just Google products.
Basically, portraying rules (that are to your disadvantage) as some kind of laws of nature. So for instance:
"To continue, you need to install the app".
Instead of
"We're not letting you read more of this since we think you're webbrowsing this on mobile and want you to install our app"
Quite often we're indeed being lied to as if we're little children.
But in this exceptional case, the "Fun disabled by administrator", it's frank! That must be because its this third party, the "administrator", which is to blame for the restriction. Were it google themselves setting the rules of the game, they would probably not frame it in the same way.
When some of your users are kids and some are adults, it seems like a situation where there really is no happy medium that will make everyone happy. Kind of tricky to deal with users who have diametrically opposed goals.
It's interesting how strongly people feel about a basic little game.
(full disclosure, I work at Google but I've never had to deal with upset teachers and upset children arguing in bugs assigned to me)
Presenting policies as facts of life (like Meta also does) is usually done to keep the abuse teams away from those angry customers and so they don’t have to reveal their anti-spam techniques. Security by obscurity does work for a while.
There are ways to get companies to actually pay attention to you; a good place to start is sending registered mail to an executive in a way that looks like you might be a lawyer. patio11 has more advice on this.
I think this is more of the case of not turning on playstation or tv while they do homework.
The ticket is literally about distraction - the kid intends to do work, the game is literally placed in the middle and the kid forgets what was original goal. 100% normal for kids and I would not blamed neither them nor teachers.
is bad - because it gives an error message stating the owner has disabled the dinosaur game, but gates the game just based on whether the device is enrolled. The owner has not explicitly disabled the game, nor has any way to reenable it, as the message suggests; google has.
If you are more worried about your students playing some easter egg game instead of improving your teaching, you have already lost connection to the folks you're trying to teach.
You've typed exactly what I was thinking, in a far more eloquent way than I could have worded it.
Reminds me of the constant battle between my high school's sys admin and those smart kids who knew all the Windows 2000 network commands!
It's not necessarily the teacher's fault. They could be perfectly adequate (not extremely boring as a baseline), but you have students that may have ADHD, ODD, etc, and just the temptation knowing the hidden game is there is enough to jack up the excitement level of an otherwise rather boring game enough to detract from classes.
I suppose the irony here would be that if “Fun” had not been disabled by the administrator however, the ADHD kids might be playing the dinosaur game and actually able to listen better (rather than wasting class time attempting to bypass it)
Wow, this brings me back. My son is now in 9th grade, but I remember having to go to the principal's office of his private school in 4th grade because he'd "hacked the school tablets to install games on them" and, in doing so, rendered the tablets inoperable. After talking to the principal and teacher (IT guy was on vacation, apparently) about how serious and disruptive it was, I still had no clue about what he'd actually done.
Later, when we got home, I asked him what he'd done and he let me know that he learned that if he turned-off WiFi via the physical button on the tablet, dino game would appear in the browser. Naturally, he showed his friends, and they all made the great decision to play the game in class.
The next morning, I dropped him off a little early so he could show the teacher how to access the game and how to turn WiFi back on.
I got a chuckle out of Edward, the frontend person learning about differences between the renderer and the browser process, which at this point is laid out for everyone in Electron's documentation: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/process-mode...
I was struggling with this as well the first time I wanted to look inside an Electron app.
(Also that the change stopped the fun for Googlers that had enrolled devices as well. Is that still true?)
crbug 462221 links to crbug 471738 [1] - in which they change it from a simple "is device enrolled?" check into something that can be controlled with some kind of policy (not sure about the specifics). I'm not a Googler but based on 462221#c18 [2] it seems like turning off the easter egg would lead to some small but significant pushback, so I'm guessing they have a way to set the policy (even if there's no UI for it in the Google Admin Console).
>Nit pick about 'Dinosaurs are extinct' is that there's clearly an icon of the t-rex displayed on the page unless we switched out the icon with the asteroids one.
I think the wording of the error message that was eventually implemented is still off because in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device!
I doubt the effectiveness of turning off this game, kids will be distracted either way. Does it really matter if they play the dinosaur game or stare out of the window?
> in many schools parents are supposed to buy the Chromebooks that then get used during lessons. Your administrator is not always the owner of the device!
Which should be illegal. If the parents have to pay for a Chromebook, then the parents should have final control over it, not the school district.
In some areas, many schools have been retrofitted or rebuilt with only one tiny window per classroom, and the desks arrayed with the window behind the students. Aside from energy efficiency, the usual rationalisation I've received is that students being able to see out the windows makes it "too difficult" for the teachers.
To me, this seems like trying to making the entire environment more boring than the already-boring lesson/teacher in the vain hope that this will lead to magical goodness.
Anecdata: I had almost exclusively schools with huge walls of windows, and the 'distraction' of the outside world was all that made some of my lessons bearable. Mind-numbing boredom is not a paved road to teaching me and getting me to retain much. I definitely observed and received correction for excessive distraction sometimes. This also happened in classrooms that had no interesting views. For me, the more dull and utilitarian the classroom, the more likely I'll spend the class time reading ahead in the literature book, writing about other topics in my notebook, or drawing. Trying to "remove distractions" instead of livening up the course material may be…pessimal.
All the armchair education experts in this thread who say it’s not the distraction, it’s the poor teaching, (1) have never set foot in a k12 classroom as an adult; (2) completely forget their own experience as k12 students. You can have the most engaging lessons and any small distraction will kill the momentum.
I am sorry but I cannot agree with this at all. It is not long ago that I went through this education, but there are far too many poor teachers. Education is a difficult problem to solve, but that doesn't mean that banning anything that competes with the attention is the solution.
If teachers are so boring such that the majority of students are turning to a dinosaur game, then the lesson is already not going to be learned. Might as well just give them a pamphlet and tell them to study for the test, as that is what is basically happening anyways but with more timing flexibility.
If it is only a minority of students doing the dinosaur game, then they will turn to something else anyways. Thus the blanket policy it implements according to other commenters just ruins it for others.
While the topic of teaching has come up, are there schools that do project-based learning in high school-ish settings? Like teaching kids geometry through wood shop class?
Seems like a fun thing to teach, at least for a few years, teaching kids skills via projects.
On the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is the mentality that would ban pencils because they can be used to scribble drawings instead of paying attention to class.
To butcher up a Montessori quote: it is an interesting piece of work that grabs a child's concentration. Not rules.