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by Maya Swan (7th)

You may have tried to play the famous “Chrome Dinosaur Game” when your chromebook was offline on the ride to or from school, just to be met with an unlucky surprise. You press the spacebar to try and start the game when you see that the dinosaur (also known as the “Chrome Dino”) has met his end. He looks shocked as 3 meteors rain down from the sky, just as the prophecy has foretold. The 11 fateful words flash in the bottom corner, “The owner of this device has turned off the dinosaur game.”

The Chrome Dinosaur game is a simple easter egg that was implemented by Google to have something to do when you are offline, when you couldn’t do anything. The game is about a pixelated dinosaur endlessly running while trying to avoid birds and cacti. You press the spacebar for your dinosaur to jump while it's running as fast as its little legs can handle.

The game progressively gets faster, until you inevitably hit a cactus and its Game Over. Harmless game right? Well the school district doesn’t think so. Across all school devices the pixelated dinosaur continuously meets his death with the 3 fatal asteroids falling from space, to crush him and his dreams of being in the dinosaur olympics.

You may be asking, “Why would the school block a harmless game?” I ask myself this question too. It is unclear why the school would disable the Dinosaur Game when games that promote violence are left untouched. If the game is also only available when there is no access to the internet, then there is no worry that kids would be playing this during class.

Through Lightspeed, it should be clear when a student has intentionally turned off their WI-FI to be able to play it. Although there are various websites that have it so you can play the dinosaur game, they aren’t the safest or the most reliable. These websites aren’t secure and can easily carry viruses.

Even if one computer has a virus, as long as it is connected to the school’s internet, it can easily spread throughout any others that are as well. This, although unlikely, could happen and could easily be avoided if the dinosaur game was unblocked so students wouldn’t feel the need to find work-arounds to play the beloved game. 

UNBLOCK THE DINOSAUR GAME!