We have a few math games (and some not-so-math games) on our site, and the students spend a lot of time playing the games, cheating at the games, being mean to each other about the games, and complaining about the games.

In one of these games, the students can compete against each other to see who can solve fairly routine problems faster. These are problems along the lines of “I am 6 years older than my sister. What was my sister’s age when I was three times as old as she was?” We have a collection of over 10,000 problems, and the students devote a lot of time to finding strategies to answer the problems quickly. Since the rating system for this game is similar to an Elo system, so the students will also create a bunch of fake accounts to “compete” against and artificially inflate their ratings. There is also a chat feature in the game so that the students can coordinate matches against each other and discuss the problems. You can probably guess that not all 12-year-olds use the chat feature in an entirely wholesome way.

And I haven’t even started to get into the complaining. They complain when we enforce the rules. They complain about some of the problems. They complain (ok, this might be justifiable) that the networking infrastructure underlying the game hasn’t been updated in almost 10 years, so the way we hacked in persistent connections doesn’t work in most browsers on an iPad. There is a lot of complaining.

A small group of students decided that since we were not making it a priority to change the game (and the way we manage it) in the ways that they wanted to see it changed, they were going to write their own clone of the game.

Several days later, they made an excited post on one of our message boards: The clone of the game was ready for testing! Come play the new game that the students wrote.

Oh, the complaining that they are receiving in their thread on the message board! How are they storing the passwords, inquires a user. The programmers reply that the passwords are encrypted. My inner meme generator pulls out “Kermit drinking tea” and wonders if they are salting the hashes. There are not enough problems, complain the users testing this quickly-written very-new game. The programmers probably don’t realize that we have a lot of people who work full time doing little more than writing, editing, and testing cool problems for our various offerings.

The new game has no way to detect users creating multiple accounts. Nothing to stop students from harrassing each other. They can’t turn off the chat feature for users that are being disruptive. No system to deal with problems that are broken. None of the infrastructure to keep the actions on the front end from devolving into the Lord of the Flies.

Kermit drinking tea isn’t even going to think about what might or might not be going on on the back end. This is not the only group of h4ck3rz that frequent these games. Other students are going to try to break it. Kermit has other suspicions as well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on our site there are an awful lot of students who are freaking out about the exact path that they need to take in order to be admitted to a conventionally prestigious college. Word has gotten out that they need to have a “passion” in order to be admitted to the college of their choice, and they are asking around on our message boards wondering what they should pick as their passion. What sort of passion will impress the committee? What if too many other students choose the same passion?

I could tell these college-glory-seeking students that instead they should be like the game-cloning students and find something in the world that is annoying them and try to do something to fix it and then deal with all of the unexpected issues and whatnot that comes with trying to actually do something. But then I worry that the follow-up question would be to ask me which other game on the site they should try to rewrite and which programming language would be most impressive. (COBOL on 12” vinyl.)