These kids are the future?

Thursday, May 18, 2023

I had a good group of 4th graders today in the library. It was the last book check out of the year for them, as well as time for them to work on their slide show of the ABCs of summer. This was an ongoing project they started last week. About half of them were finished, so I said they could go to the maker’s space after checkout. Makers’ space has Legos and Magnetiles that they can build with. A few kids went there, but several asked if they could go to the coding website we used earlier in the week. I said sure – since it was what we did last time. I thought it was quite wonderful that they wanted to revisit a previous activity.

Yeah. I am so silly. I was doing check outs – and showing kids their overdue books – then checking in on the builders in the makers’ space. When I got back over to the regular tables after about 10 minutes, I was very interested in the kids who were playing Candy Clicker. This was definitely not one of the approved websites I expected them to be using, but at least 6 of them were mesmerized by it.

Candy Clicker is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. You click – either on your touch screen or on your trackpad – a picture of a piece of candy. That’s it. You watch the number counter roll ever upwards. There are multipliers to make the numbers go faster, and other things no one could tell me about because they were completely MESMERIZED by clicking. Just clicking. JUST CLICKING.

But WAIT! There’s more. Or less. You (well, probably not actually you, because if you are an adult, I can almost certainly guess that you will never play Candy Clicker) can download a self-clicker that clicks FOR YOU, so you can do even less (nothing, actually). You just sit and watch the picture of candy move ever so slightly, like it is being touched, while your number count continues to spin.

I told them it was an insane game. I waved my arms to try to get them to break eye contact with it. I asked them if they might be going insane playing it. I suggested the makers’ space as an alternative. I said they might be insane for being unable to stop playing a game that had no game to it. I complimented the kids actually doing something school approved on their chromebooks.

Those insane comments were spread out across five minutes or so, but now that I think about it, someone will tell their parents that I called them insane and now I will lose my job.

Oh well.