School Chromebooks

I am a high school student, and so while I am at school I have to use the school-provided computers. The school district chose to give us Chromebooks. And anyone who needs to do some serious coding (like me) knows that Chromebooks are utterly useless.

Thankfully I have access to the GitHub Web Editor (which I am now using), so that takes away some of the hassle. But the biggest concern still remains: The school IT administrator has practically locked down our Chromebooks so that we can’t do anything useful with what little processing power these ancient devices have. They have force-installed Chrome extensions (GoGuardian) that I have seen lawyers online categorize as spyware. They have forced us to go behind a trigger-happy filter proxy – which, for example, blocks www.mypy-lang.org because it categorizes it as “freeware/shareware” (despite it being an perfectly school-appropriate section of the Python Software Foundation), blocks www.conwaylife.com as “Games” (which it is not, it is a serious academic discussion and research site), and even blocks the Wikipedia page on amateur radio because it has the keyword of “amateur” in the URL (no comment on this one).

And if that’s not enough, here’s the kicker: They have disabled the Chrome developer tools (Ctrl+Shift+I), so I have no idea what’s going wrong when my code crashes or hangs. I can’t use the debugger. I can’t see the output of console.log calls. I can’t test functions. All I can do is hope it works and there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I have to wait until I get home where there’s no such indiscriminate censoring on my own computer.

Oh well. Sorry for the rant.

I just can’t get over how much the school admins try to spoil our fun.