The Hechinger Report is developing a print edition, and desires young artists to contribute. Find out more here.
This spring, I spoke with a mama in rural Washington, D.C., who was growing significantly worried about an absence of filters on her kids’ school devices. During class this year, her kids watched Kendrick Lamar videos on YouTube, she told me. One got home knowing the words to a semaglutide commercial. Parents at the school shared concerns that their 4th graders regularly played a game called BitLife, a text-based life simulation game produced in 2018.
She was among more than 45 parents, educators and experts across the nation for my recent story about the hazardous material and games children access on their school-issued gadgets,
From my reporting, I had actually already become aware of– and experimented with– other video games primary trainees are playing at schools around the country, one including Jeffrey Epstein and another where a “corpse-like grandmother” chases players with a bloody baseball bat. In contrast, BitLife’s facility sounded less troubling than some others I had played, maybe even fairly innocent. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.)
< img width =" 780" height="951"src =" https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mader-EC-tech-distraction-push-1.png?resize=780%2C951&ssl=1" alt=""/ > I began the video game as “Ally Baker,”the child of a school psychologist and law enforcement officer. The game then presented me with random life situations and asked me to pick how to react. When my character was 5 years of ages, a screen turned up that read, “You broke your moms and dads’ sex toy while you were attempting to understand what it was. What will you do?” (The choices were to confess or lie about it.) My character went on to be assaulted by her brother, identified with depression and diagnosed with cervical cancer. (In between those events, I also failed my chauffeur’s test.) Ally Baker died at age 21.
As troubling as it is to think about elementary-age children playing this game, I learned while reporting my current story that this is simply the suggestion of the iceberg. While some districts have layers of blocks and filters, others have a piecemeal approach, with far less blocks. And even in some districts that attempt to obstruct material, kids are typically able to outmaneuver the filters and gain access to hugely unsuitable material. In truth, numerous game designers– and fellow students– are assisting them do so.
When I initially navigated to BitLife, for instance, the site boasted about having the ability to circumvent blocks since it was utilizing a proxy server: “BitLife is offered to play unblocked right here on Bitlife.School. This suggests you can start a new life on your school Chromebook, library computer system, or even at work throughout a break.” I found another site hosting the video game that encouraged players they might “press CTRL+Q to conceal your screen.” Doing so altered the screen to a page titled “Mathematics Lesson Notes– Week 3 Introduction” with notes about a phony math lesson. (Although the tab at the top still check out “Bitlife.”) Questions sent to an email address on the Bitlife website were not answered as of Thursday morning.
Numerous video game sites can be hidden with a few keystrokes, as revealed here.
I also discovered a Google Doc with dozens of links to unblocked video games. (Schools use, and do not block, Google Docs.) Not only are these sites well aware of schools trying to block video games, a few of them appear to be actively attempting to enable trainees to keep playing, showing just another of the numerous difficulties schools are up against when it pertains to kids and innovation.
Read my story, published in partnership with Mind/Shift.
This story about video games on schools gadgets was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent wire service focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register for the Hechinger newsletter.
Was this story useful? Leave an idea to support your education reporters.
The Hechinger Report is a nonprofit newsroom powered by reader assistance
Republish our articles totally free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.