> But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.
Indeed there are! I was in high school around 20 years ago, and our computers were “locked down”. You couldn’t install anything (or really run any unapproved binary), access to system tools was disabled, and every time a computer rebooted, it would wipe a clean image to the HD so no changes would be saved to disk.
My friend and I figured out how to bypass the lockdown before boot, and made a floppy that did so. Removing evidence of tampering was as simple as shutting down the PC. From there, we added a menu to the bootloader, put it on a CD, wrote a simple Visual Basic app launcher on the CD, and included Quake 2/3, GTA, Worms, and a handful of other games that could all install or run from the launcher, and then sold the CDs for idk $10 a pop?
We also learned that every computer in our district (that we had access to test on) used the same admin password for all the remote VNC access, which was fun. And the same password (different from the VNC password at least?) for all of the networked printers in the district - on football game day, we printed hundreds of our school’s logo on a rival school’s printers, with the logo being just barely off-white.
There's definitely technical/fancy tomfoolery. But I'm also just surprised in very low-tech ways.
I once had someone draw a very elaborate stick figure fight in CAD for an entire 74 minute period instead of the high priority project his teammates were waiting on.
It's tricky for me in the engineering project classes, because I'll often be very deeply involved with one group teaching a new task or skill. 90% of the time the other groups will make good progress, but the other 10% yields interesting surprises. I definitely am more careful to show up unexpectedly more and to carefully look at screens, not just to shrug when they look OK-ish from 15' away.