Kudos to the parent for setting clear limits to their kids cell phone use.
Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
Looking at kids growing up now and stories from teachers in classrooms it's dystopic IMO. A 1/3 of teachers' time spent battling for attention against TikTok. Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. No room for boredness-initiated creativity in the lives whatsoever.
I don't think Soma from Brave New World was all that far off from what's happening with smartphones.
I hope we're at the top of the curve now though, at least in Norway phone use in education and social settings is seen more and more like smoking and more and more parents at least try to delay the introduction of screens for as long as they can. And (some) high schools are finally imposing PROPER bans against smartphones during class (i.e. confiscation rather than "I promise not to use it" which simply doesn't work). It's a hard long battle at this point though; made harder by adult techno-optimists (most of whom I can only assume probably haven't properly seen teenagers these days in action)
> Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat.
Why are phones allowed in the classroom? When I was in school, if you were caught looking at your phone in class, or if the phone made a noise from your pocket/bag, it would instantly be confiscated - no second chances.
If phones are causing problems in school, maybe the school could try establishing some basic standards of behaviour and discipline? How is this difficult?
I got my phone taken away in high school once because my dad called me during the lunch hour to ask me for a number on an insurance card that was in my wallet. I was sitting outside eating, answered the call, read him the number, and hung up. About thirty seconds later, a teacher came outside, took my phone away, and gave me a detention.
I wasn't disrupting class or distracting myself at all. This was on a dumb phone, taking a call from a parent. I argued against the detention and was told that my school had a "zero tolerance" policy for cell phone use under any circumstances, just like weapons.
The US completely gave up on the idea of actually stopping school shootings, so parents now only feel comfortable if they can contact their children 24/7.
Yeah I dunno if I buy that explanation, for reasons given in both of the sibling comments. I think it's more likely that students are dopamine-addicted to their phones and don't know how to exercise the necessary self control, and parents and teachers are unwilling or unable to do it for them.
It makes DARE from the 90s feel even more surreal than it already did when I lived through it as a student. Kids, don't do drugs, but it is okay to become dependent on technology.
I would say the exact same thing as you. But, that is Norway for you...
I think the issue might be that in Norway the teachers would not be allowed to confiscate the phone; concerns about school being liable if device is damaged etc.
This autumn luckily the Norwegian government FINALLY, very long overdue, made it clear phones should not be allowed. In the school where my wife teaches this made a night and day difference as they started requiring the use of a "phone hotel" during class. But in other schools they for some reason do not.
I was in the school many years ago. The cell phone was still not invented (for other 10 years). But having ANY electronic gadget was no-go. Like, parents being cited, whole program...
I've been working on getting a calendar on an Inkplate 10. Great hardware but my god is the Arduino software awful. It doesn't even have incremental builds! A one line change to my code means it completely recompiles a ton of libraries including mbedtls! The edit-compile-run cycle is like 3 minutes. Awful.
Arduino code and APIs are also really badly designed, and badly documented. The Inkplate uses an Xtensa ESP32 so the network code uses this crap:
Does `int read();` block? Zero comments so you'll have to read the code, which by the way is very hard to find because of course intellisense doesn't work in the gimped VSCode that Arduino is calling their IDE (it's better than the old one at least, though it wouldn't take much).
The really frustrating thing is that Arduino has basically zero competition. I was hopeful for Mbed Studio for a while but they spent so long fucking it up with web based compilers, terrible home-brewed build systems (yotta? I think they went through several bad attempts), before finally doing the right thing (Mbed Studio) that I think everyone had given up waiting and they killed the whole project. Also it's obviously ARM only.
And I can't see that really changing. I think there's PlatformIO but I think that just wraps the Arduino code in less awfulness. As long as hardware manufacturers are writing their drivers and examples for Arduino it's going to be hard for anyone else to compete.
Ok I think my one-line change has finished compiling now...
The Arduino IDE uses the gcc toolset for actually compiling and linking. You can use those directly if you would like incremental builds.
If you turn on verbose logging in the IDE the logs will show the actual commands it is using to invoke gcc which is handy to figure out locations and flags needed for the various commands.
The verbose IDE log should also show the command line tool (probably avrdude) that is used to download the binary to your Arduino.
I think the beauty and genius of Arduino was how much more accessible that project made microcontroller development for great many people. As a pro-SWE and dabbling electronics person, I had bounced off the PIC and other toolchains, sometimes managing to get a simple 8051 project working. Then Arduino came along and it was like a light switch was turned on. (Witness how many professional AVR programmers were up in arms over the vast eternal September that suddenly flooded the area. :D )
The IDE tooling is terrible/frustrating for pros in many ways, but "it just works" in some other very important ways. You can get to hello-world (blink an LED) in under 5 minutes. That's huge and appears to be more of what Arduino is targeting.
You've missed what Arduino is for. The Arduino software/hardware combination is not meant for professional hardware and software engineers who know what they're doing. You're complaining about the quality of the software, elsewhere you'll find EEs bemoaning the fact that most practical use cases of an Arduino could be replaced with a 555 timer chip.
In any event, you don't HAVE to use the Arduino software. If you hate it so much, stop using it! The Arduino software just wraps existing open source "normal" MCU toolchains, you can use those directly instead.
> You've missed what Arduino is for. The Arduino software/hardware combination is not meant for professional hardware and software engineers who know what they're doing.
No I haven't. This kind of "but it's for beginners!!" argument is nonsense on two fronts:
1. Just because it's for beginners doesn't give it an excuse to be bad. Why doesn't incremental compilation work? Why doesn't it have a proper build system? Why is the API so awful? You can fix all those without hurting beginner friendliness - in fact fixing those would make it more beginner friendly.
2. The fact that it is soooo popular means that there isn't a good alternative "pro" option anyway, so I am more or less forced to use the "for beginners but terrible" Arduino because it's what everyone else does. Why shouldn't people who know what they're doing be able to use Arduino?
What the pros actually do is use the vendor-specific SDKs, but those have their own big downsides (namely they're vendor specific).
A great hack that feels closer to Anjan Katta’s vision for what Daylight could become – that instead of VR or AR or projection, we end up putting high quality “natural” screens on more surfaces.
This classroom timetable shows the utility of that, and it’s not so hard to imagine it extending to other interactive or non-interactive uses (meeting room reservation, digital store pricing, bus timetables, etc.).
When my company were doing RTO they had a SaaS platform to book seats, but of course that information was not displayed anywhere so people just sat wherever, making the whole process pointless.
This got me curious about small eInk labels that we could set up some API webhook to refresh. Turns out there's not really any out of the box solutions to do this.
If someone is looking for something similar with less hassle, let me plug my friend’s product :) https://www.inklay.app/
I’ve been using it for the better part of a year now to show the weather, a dashboard and some comics and am very happy with it, it just works and looks great too
I know it may be at odds with "less hassle", but any thoughts/plans on making it compatible with Home Assistant? Would be nice to have an option to show an HA dashboard there.
Is this a common thing? When I was in school the timetable was printed on paper and applied for the whole term. What are these substitutions and changes and why do they happen frequently enough to need daily updates?
Does the kid have to memorise this in the morning so he knows why rooms to go to?
I don't even think my parents were aware of my school timetable. Why would they be? That was my business. It seems a bit weird to me that parents get involved to such an extent.
At least in The Netherlands, about 15 years ago when I was in high school, timetables where set for a whole semester, but absent teachers where quite normal meaning some lessons where canceled. Replacements where not always available and where usually only deployed when it was known a teacher was absent for extended time.
As a teen this was great because sometimes you could stay in bed longer, be out earlier and not having to carry the extra books (not sure if that still is a problem now).
edit: I just remember we even had call trees to call your classmates in the morning if classes got canceled. This was before the internet, making it not 15 years ago but at least 20, probably more. I'm getting old...
I went to school 20+ years ago in a school of 3000+ kids in the UK. There simply never were room changes for us. I don't get why you'd make the kids change rooms. Just set the timetable for the year, now the kids are going to be in those rooms at those times. Simple. Any changes, just make the teachers deal with it. In a system where the children outnumber the teachers ~30:1 and have smaller brains and smaller bodies this seems to make more sense to me.
As for cancelled lessons, I wish! That never happened. We had a substitute teacher every time. But the substitute came to the room we were already scheduled to be in.
The only reasons I can think for making the kids change is if there's a problem with the room itself or if the teachers are not interchangeable between rooms. But I would have thought teachers would find room changes easier now than back then, if anything (given the use of ubiquitous technology like projectors etc.).
When I was at school, about 15 years ago, our school had screens hanging in the hallways, showing the timetables in a slideshow manner. And changes to your timetable were a daily occurrence. A teacher would get sick, a room got swapped. The school eventually got their own app for students.
yes, definitely. if you don't check the schedule multiple times per day, you're bound to end up in an empty classroom or missing class. at least once a week, in my high school experience, a class gets moved in time and/or place, or gets cancelled entirely.
it's like train timetables, you know. yes, they're meant to be the same every day, but you'd be a fool not to check the updates before you go. that's just how it is in a large chaotic system.
What is a word for this type of product? My spouse recently expressed an interest in "Skylight" and this has brought me down a rabbithole of displays for family coordination systems:
Kids are getting scheduling via apps now? The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it. I've finally reached that "back in my day" age.
It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
Scheduling, and homework assignments, and textbooks [0], and handing in homework, and communicating absences, and asking the teacher a question later in the day in a groupchat, and the teacher sending an extra thing for everyone to read outside of class even just out of general interest, and communicating with peers about something in another class groupchat where the teacher isn't present, and...
Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections.
Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset.
While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1].
Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work.
[0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources.
[1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
Isn't it good they don't know these differences? The fact we know is mostly due to poorly designed UX, not some high level concept that needs to be known. Modern phones are a much better UX for most people.
No, I think it's debilitating, disempowering, wholly unnecessary, and that it would be easily solvable if there existed a will to solve it. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one, I mean.
I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user.
The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
No need to understand where the data goes, where it is stored, who owns it, what they know about you and what is shared with third parties, what is costs to provide such a service (even though none of its users seem to pay anything), how it is monetized, how dark UI patterns nudge you, how algorithms manipulate you, why you can get addicted to them.
Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
> That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.
Back when I was young I was completely astonished by that mindset... but now that I'm older, I kinda get it. When you gotta juggle 8 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, 1-2 hours of chores, and completely forget about kids or a sane sleep schedule... you don't have the time dealing with bullshit, you need something that works. And you got money to pay for that, too.
Yeah, most of my friends that don't work programming or building computers couldn't care less. I think we try to reflect our own beliefs on what computers should be and how people should interact with them but that is not the reality for most people, they just want to do a thing and click a button, anything else is too much work.
When i was getting a new computer to my father in law the main requirement was that it would be hard for him to do stupid stuff, like install a virus, so we went with a mac. It makes a lot of sense for him to use a very limited device because all he does is browse, watch youtube and listen to music, why does he have to understand all the details of how all of this works at all?
> Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
Systems evolve until they reach the maturity of elevators. Press the button, it goes to your floor. Some users might wish they could change the button LED color, make it blink to the elevator music's rhythm and swap the scheduling algorithm on the fly with their custom choice... I guess they are all here !
My mom doesn't want to be a "liberated computer user", she wants to use her phone to watch youtube, see pics of her grandkids and listen to music, she doesn't even care about having social networks. You're projecting your own personal interests into others, the world contains multitudes, not everyone wants to understand every little detail of how computers work.
For most people computers are like cars, they couldn't care less about how they work, as long as they can use them to take them from place A to place B.
This comment is mildly ironic because the same kind of argument has often been used around cars. Do you want to be merely a car driver, or do you want to be a car "operator", who understands (to some level of abstraction) what happens "under the hood" when you manipulate the levers and wheels in your car?
Different strokes for different folks, but never forget, knowledge is power.
Jesus, no. Computer illiteracy is a growing problem, kids and teens nowadays have trouble understanding even the basics of what's going on in their computers apart from "swipe here for the next addictive depressive 5-second slop". That's very very bad at a time when these devices are more and more important in their lives.
When I was a kid, general understanding of computers was so basic that "my computer was struck by lightning and now it is sentient" seemed like a reasonable plot device.
In more practical terms, this extended to things like not understanding why an Acorn-formatted floppy disk, or Doom for Windows, couldn't be read by a Mac.
Naturally, another memory of those days was my dad complaining that "these days" people couldn't understand the electrical circuits because everything was getting replaced with ICs where the only thing you could do if it failed was throw the entire chip away and replace it.
This is hardly new. My high school did this over fifteen years ago. This app just shows hour+subject+teacher+room number. Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.
Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable.
As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
> Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).
I guess it's a way of handling it that's enabled by the fact that the calendars are electronic. It could be that this way is easier for the school staff, but honestly I have no idea and can't even begin to guess, really.
Even in 2024, schools in major cities experience staffing shortages where there are not enough supposedly-qualified adults to supervise all of the students in their originally scheduled classrooms.
"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.
Schools are different all over the world. I believe rooms were assigned to teachers as much as possible, but not every teacher needed a room all day every day so there was the occasional change-up. For instance, sometimes biology/chemistry/physics needing the few lab rooms for experiments, and those had to be scheduled in somehow. That also caused other rooms to bump every now and then.
Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.
We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).
In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.
Having had a paper planner in high school I don't recall there really being many issues with rooms needing to be swapped or teachers being ill having an impact. If the teacher is ill, the other teacher just takes their room.
Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.
It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.
It does sound like a dynamic digital schedule is just an invitation for a school to be sloppy. It's been a long time but I just don't recall situations where schedules changed a lot.
Good points. However unlocking the phone in the morning puts my son on the wrong track: you would be surprised how much time one can spend checking animated gifs by using any text field that will inevitably be unlocked as well.
Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
I applaud your efforts to keep your son from being addicted to screens.
While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".
In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
I can’t recall even one time my high school schedule changed except between semesters, not any time a class met in another room. Not once. If a teacher was out sick, there was a sub but the room didn’t change.
What can I say, my school worked differently and this was a common occurrence. I do believe they tried to minimise room changes or hour changes as much as possible, but you have to do something if the only relevant substitutes would already be teaching another class at the same time.
In my experience, substitute teachers were generally not skilled in a particular subject. There were there to be an adult in the room. They typically had a lesson plan left by the regular teacher, which almost always involved just reading or working problems on your own and did not depend on the sub being able to actually teach the subject.
If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.
Same for me. Genuinely doesn’t understand what’s the benefits for anyone. Maybe trying to get back "lost" hours when a teacher is sick? I think kids are better served with a stable, secure schedule than one that try to absolutely fit all the modalities decided for that school year.
Imo it should be the school's responsibility to stick a notice on the classroom itself or at least send an email, rather than expect each and every student to check an app every day. I hadn't been a high school student in a while through.
I agree that there should be a physical fallback or sorts, but I think it's helpful to be prepared just in case. If the school is too lazy to display schedule changes at school for some reason, the app becomes a necessity and that's just stupid.
You managed, good for you! Thankfully, we got it better, and kids these days have it even better. I don't see how that's a bad thing, every generation should strive to make things better for the next ones.
I don't think it's "better" to make kids check a multitude of ever-changing apps and screens just to find out their timetable for the day.
What on earth is the point? When I was a kid we just had the same timetable repeating every week. It changed once a year, at the beginning of the academic year, meaning that within a few weeks I knew it from memory and didn't need to keep looking it up.
In the extremely rare event that things deviated from the timetable, the school found a way to tell us. It's not hard to convey a message to a group of students when you know exactly which room they'll physically be in at any given moment; another advantage of a fixed timetable.
If the school can't accomplish such basic tasks as scheduling a simple timetable, that's the adults' problem, not the children's.
I received a paper planner every school year from elementary school until I went to college. In elementary school the teacher would stand over us while we wrote in it.
I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back.
Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
> the best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it
A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context.
Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
Even if the money is in flying 747s (it isn't), learning to fly a Cessna at a younger age is still beneficial. Same with cash money and young children.
For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it?
If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency.
But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever.
(I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
I think digital money is just too abstract for kids, and even adults struggle with comparing amounts and truly grasping their significance. Handing over a stack of bills just feels a lot more significant than swiping your card, which is the same whether you’re buying a $5 coffee or a $5000 tranche of a home renovation. With cash, you have a lot of the stuff in your hand, and then you have less vs none.
> I think digital money is just too abstract for kids, and even adults struggle with comparing amounts and truly grasping their significance. Handing over a stack of bills just feels a lot more significant than swiping your card, which is the same whether you’re buying a $5 coffee or a $5000 tranche of a home renovation. With cash, you have a lot of the stuff in your hand, and then you have less vs none.
But, that's how the world works. What major bills are you paying that you pay c cash for in the last decade? All the more reason to teach kids to operate in this way.
Well, similar to how Montessori (and now most public schools, it seems) deal in manipulatives first, and then switch to abstract later, I think the same makes sense for money.
And I actually have been going back to cash more often, and I spend noticeably less when I do. And I’m an engineer who loves spreadsheets, so I’m guessing it causes most people bigger spending issues.
Games and such do not have the real-world consequences of cash. I've sent all my kids to go out and e.g. buy some groceries. They learn to count their change and deal with strangers who might not be trustworthy. They learn to protect their wallets and not lose it. They learn to look at price tags. All real world skills that games do not simulate.
> All real world skills that games do not simulate.
Learning to protect and not lose a wallet, or to count change… seems like exactly the kind of thing that no longer matters, as we move to more digital money everywhere. What change, what wallet?
Outside those points: multiplayer games with currencies in them simulate all of the rest, and even single player games simulate some of those things.
But not skills that translate to the biggest outgoings you will have as an adult. It doesn’t prepare you for having your salary appear as a number, and your rent or mortgage disappear as another line.
They’re good building blocks but they’re not enough.
> It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
Quite neat, indeed.
I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1].
This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles.
This adds some projects for over the coming break.
Yup, however at the same time there's been an effort to give kids paper planners again as well. Of course, that's been completely ineffective as they still had the apps, all results are published there, and more importantly, last minute schedule updates are still in there too. The school frequently cancels lessons due to teacher shortages; I think they should offer alternatives then, at the very least so that the school days are the same every day. Having to check the night before or even right before leaving if there's any changes is a headache.
When I was in high school 20 years ago, the school published a big sheet of paper on the central notice board, updated each day. Heading there first thing in the morning and seeing whether some of your classes got cancelled was a nice social ritual.
At my high school in South Africa, in the late 80s/early 90s, we had a two-week schedule, so you had to remember not only which day it was, but whether it was week one or week two!
In same timeframe in Sweden we had one schedule with eight different classes every day except the few days when we had a lesson that was two "blocks" long. Everything was in 40 min blocks with a clear pattern of breaks between. We got to copy that down each year by hand on graph paper making the lines and everything. This lead to us mostly knowing our schedules by the second week and hardly having to look at it.
Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was.
The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
> The best thing my school ever did for me was give me a paper planner and teach me how to use it.
While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
This is a nice project, but personally I'd favor demanding that the school come up with an alternate solution for your son that doesn't require you to supply smartphone. Rather than allowing them to shift the burden to you
Why would there be so many changes? Do they seem legitimate, or more like they are trying to justify spending money on the scheduling system and playing with the new toy?
It is more related to sick leave and general scarcity of teachers. I guess before the existence of timetable apps they were better in finding creative ways around those changes.
In my experience, teacher absences just meant substitutes, another teacher swapping over / handling two classes, or an impromptu class period spent watching something on tv.
I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
I'm also confused by this: "our family’s morning routine [includes] the daily check of the timetable and substitution plan for the kids’ school".
I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning.
With many schools banning mobile phones, and similar communications devices, there aren't many alternatives to paper. Also, my elementary school uses paper planners. Given that most elementary schools forbid students from carrying electronics (for no other reason than loss and damage), there isn't much of a choice except paper planners.
This is cool, but on a second thought it's sad that someone had to jump through so many hoops -- not just to get his idea implemented because of lacking APIs etc., but that the school provides such a crappy service in the first place.
But then you realize that we're talking about Germany here, and before you downvote, trust me, anyone who has lived there for a while and especially if they had to deal with public administration will attest that it's a country that's literally 10 to 20 years behind in everything digital. You wouldn't expect it given Germany's engineering reputation, but improving citizen's lives through IT has never been their forte.
When we lived there for some years, the school my kids went to had four(!) different parallel channels of communication in the class that one of my kids attended at the time. That is, you could potentially receive a message, say, from the teacher through one of four different means, and so you were expected to monitor these channels every day. Some of them were apps, some of them were paper. It was a mess. Simply doing nothing digitally and only using paper slips would have been an improvement already.
When I lived in Wales a German friend of mine shocked me by complimenting what was then Arriva Wales's railway services. The Cambrian Line was and presumably still is notoriously under-served with small, old trains that are ruinously expensive and constantly delayed/cancelled (common story in the UK). I always assumed German trains would be pretty good but apparently not.
From the sample code... I would recommend $PASSWD not $PWD for the placeholder to reduce confusion with the linux / osx env var $PWD which is the current directory.
> In other words: extracting the information as text and displaying it in a similar way on the e-paper would be … work.
So instead let me:
1. take a screenshot of the website
2. Change the styling of the website as the screenshot is being taken
3. Modify the image using headless Inkscape
4. Serve the image on a web-server
And I though I liked overcomplicating things while calling it being lazy :D
Parents are now forced to give their child phones from young age and once child gets phone and internet, we all know what content they would be going to search for, no matter what parenteral controls we keep they will find a way , thats when childs degradation of brain and life starts
> The problem is that my son’s mobile phone is governed by strict parental controls, making this daily lookup an unpopular chore on my side
This was a neat project, but I feel like this is insanely overkill for a solution that is “whitelist the app required for school”.
I sort of feel bad for this kid.
I mean, I graduated high school in 15+ years ago and we had a website that we had to regularly check for assignments and project updates and things. It was a requirement of school. I know these types of sites are even more integral process wise, now a days.
Having a parent that’s such an engineer, that they impose such odd restrictions on phone use (even for a school site), sounds not fun.
It sounds like you don't have a kid who is literally incapable of self-moderating their interaction with a screen. I'm not who you are quoting, but we do.
We've given him instructions, consequences, rules, expectations, strategies, time-boxing, support, and therapy. He still CANNOT have free access to an internet-connected screen or he will end up on some video site and doom-scroll tiktok videos and the like to the exclusion of everything else that is going on or what he SHOULD be using the device for. EVERY single time. Even if we tell him he's not allowed on those sites. If we give him even a little bit for a while, he'll throw a violent and long-lasting temper tantrum when we say it's time to be done with them. And again the next time we say no. Those short-form reels/shorts/whatever seem to have all the same properties of narcotics on his brain.
The ONLY thing that works is giving him free access only to devices with limited functionality. He can watch DVDs on the TV, he can play Wii, he can play thousands of games on his retro handheld gaming console. He is fine with those things and can easily self-moderate with those. He'll do those for a while and then eventually be done with them and go outside and play, or build something out of lego. That would NEVER happen if he was allowed access to a device that he can doom-scroll on.
I think we need to acknowledge that while today's digital consumption experiences are generally unhealthy for nearly everyone, there are some non-neurotypical minds that are absolutely defenseless against it.
Stronger regulation would help everyone also those with more defenses. Who in the world is saying "I spend too little of my life doomscrolling"?
And IIUC it is the same with narcotics/alcohol/nicotine: Not everyone are equally affected by them, consequence wise and/or addiction wise, whether due to genetics or social or economic status. In those cases we use the law to regulate to protect the ones most suspectible.
That wasn't the case when these things were brand new.
In some years social media might be regulated in the way alcohol and smoking is (as Australia already did). But right now it is just the tiny beginnings of getting acceptance that parents ought to regulate their kids on this issue and that this is OK and a good thing.
I say, kudos to the parent for being restrictive about phone use. At least they are aware of the problem and doing something -- debating the exact technical limits imposed is just nitpicking. But not doing anything is irresponsible.
Do you yourself have or teach teenage kids these days? It's a bit like all kids are brought up on heroine -- everyone addicted to doomscrolling/TikTok, teachers spend all their time trying to get attention. Phones and social media have quite drastically altered the reality the kids grow up in in a quite unhealthy way. It's dystopic IMO.
Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
I agree that it seems harsh. However, I have tried the "whitelist this app" route. Turns out that, at least for me, the parental control on android is not sufficient. For example, you cannot block the app store, and in the app store you can watch video previews of games. Also, you get to watch animated gifs on every text field.
There a big difference between being an involved and active parent, and what the schools expect, which is for parents to be little secretarial-assistants and pseudo-teachers to make up for the school's lack of planning, lack of engagement with the students and lack of funding.
Most of us on HN can be grateful for having been able to fully develop our faculties in an age where instant dopamine shots weren't available 24/7.
Looking at kids growing up now and stories from teachers in classrooms it's dystopic IMO. A 1/3 of teachers' time spent battling for attention against TikTok. Teenagers sitting together and not giving each other proper attention because of constant interrupts from Snapchat. No room for boredness-initiated creativity in the lives whatsoever.
I don't think Soma from Brave New World was all that far off from what's happening with smartphones.
I hope we're at the top of the curve now though, at least in Norway phone use in education and social settings is seen more and more like smoking and more and more parents at least try to delay the introduction of screens for as long as they can. And (some) high schools are finally imposing PROPER bans against smartphones during class (i.e. confiscation rather than "I promise not to use it" which simply doesn't work). It's a hard long battle at this point though; made harder by adult techno-optimists (most of whom I can only assume probably haven't properly seen teenagers these days in action)