Look, I get why schools block some websites and restrict permissions on the computers, but my school restricts waaay more than necessary, and it's pretty frustrating when it gets in the way of completing assignments... i.e. pretty much every assignment I get in my computer classes.
More + an art below the cut!
For context: I go to school in a decently small district. I'm a senior now, but I've been pretty much fighting with the technology department for about 3 years now, lol. I go to college full time these days, so I'm not at the high school very often anymore, but I volunteer every wednesday to help out in the 'computer'/'tech' classroom (which is a whole other thing that I might get around to telling one day).
Anyway, the district is trying out some new and much more 'interesting' tech classes this year (document processing and keyboarding have been replaced with... industrial robotics and... what seems to be just 'build circuits in tinkercad' classes??? Like I said, this classroom/instructor is a whole story in and of itself).
One of the things the instructor wants to do is make these little robots/cars/vehicles/you-get-it with arduino. That'd be fine, but of course the tech department refuses to allow the tools required to compile and upload code to the arduino. arduino-ide is installed... but god forbid you try to compile your code! Compiler scary and not allowed!!!!
To be fair, this 'blockage' is almost certainly not helped by the fact that the instructor has pretty much no idea what exactly needs unblocked (the compiler, cmon... follow the error messages, please!!!), and basically has students (of which there are very few who know anything, pretty much just me and the gang) talk to the tech dept. for him. Of course, the tech department doesn't trust us students at all and always responds like were trying to pull a fast one on em.
Like, I've tried to get them to unblock github, or even just git (I can manage my own repos, just let me, please!!!), but I guess git is 'used for arbitrary code execution' (ok, I _do_ understand this one, but please bro... I'm just tryna get my work done). Everything I've tried in that class has been shot down by the tech department with a resounding 'no, stop playing games'. . . I'M THE ONLY ONE IN THE CLASS EVEN TRYING TO WORK; EVERYONE ELSE IS ON COOLMATHGAMES, FORTNITE (HOW DID THEY EVEN GET THAT ON THE SCHOOL COMPUTERS??????), OR ROBLOX (AGAIN, HOW????). PLEASSSEEEEEEEEE.
[Image ID: A crudish drawing of a computer in the lab from the post. It's a bog standard optiplex with fittingly crappy keyboard and mouse. A small (on the order of about 15cm) Hem floats(?) behind the top of the monitor with her arms hanging over the front. She rests her head on her hand in a bored/exasperated manner. The computer monitor displays a windows desktop and two applications slightly overlapping each other. The active window shows a tinkercad tab with a simple circuit involving an arduino and two motors. The other window is an arduino-ide instance with a compilation error displaying: "FU!" in red. /end ID]
