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by mechanical_bear 1208 days ago
“enough friction and a timesink”

Have you taught students before? Many will spend inordinate amounts of time to not learn the material. Often times it seems there is no friction too great if it allows one to not think too hard.
1 comments
asdff 1208 days ago
Yes, and I've been one, and know that time is finite and you have more than one class that demands work on a deadline, along with all the other fun stuff college has that pulls you away from your studies, and the not so fun stuff like part time employment. If you leave the system as it is today, its easy to copy and paste code. If you do something akin to what I proposed, you've eliminated copy and paste, and made cheating into a literal chore that isn't saving you nearly as much time as it would have otherwise, and fewer students will end up cheating. You'd be surprised at how many students I knew in undergrad who would be broke and would still pay like $400 a semester on textbooks because the friction of doing hackery things like photocopying chapters of the book in the library, or googling "my math book 2nd ed. pdf" and finding the library genesis result was just too much.

Of course the death blow for this sort of cheating is the exam, which you weight quite a bit more than the homework. A student who just copy and pastes code will still fail the class, since they can't use chatgpt in the lecture hall during exam time.

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jefftk 1208 days ago
And then someone in the dorm makes a keystroke injector, and everyone goes back to typing their code on their own computer.

Ex: https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...

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asdff 1208 days ago
IT dept can disable loading volumes that aren't the university shared drive for assignment turn in. They can also supply laptops vs desktops with wired keyboards.
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jefftk 1208 days ago
I'm proposing a device that pretends to be a keyboard, and mimics typing in the code
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asdff 1208 days ago
And a counter for that could be a laptop device with the usb ports disabled. A lot of this stuff is solved with some basic IT imo.
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jefftk 1208 days ago
You're now well past the original proposal of a Raspberry Pi. And people who need different input devices for ergonomic reasons (laptops keyboards are not a good fit for many people) are going to push back hard.

The device can make network connections, right? Someone's going to come up with a very short program you can type by hand, compile, and then pull down arbitrary other code over the network.

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dinkumthinkum 1208 days ago
Yeah but what you’re talking about is a simple typing exercise.
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