Opinion: Students’ tech skills should be nurtured, not punished

Police charged a Utah high schooler with a crime after the student wielded something in the classroom.
A gun? A knife? No — an antenna.
The Flipper Zero has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of antennas. A small device with a display and controls reminiscent of portable video game consoles, it contains a number of radios and can communicate over Bluetooth, infrared and the kind of radio frequency identification used in technology like keyless entry systems. It’s popular among radio hobbyists, internet protocol developers and security researchers, and inquisitive students with some technical know-how can use it as a super-charged universal remote control.
But to hear some law enforcement and school officials describe it, it’s a weapon of mass destruction — or, at least, mass distraction. Yet sensationalistic fear around the devices far surpasses any actual threat they pose.
Turning off a classroom television or triggering annoying Bluetooth pop-ups on nearby phones may be annoying and slightly disruptive, and schools have a right to address these incidents. However, these pranks ultimately demonstrate the lack of security for our day-to-day devices, and the students using the devices may well become the next generation of security researchers who could fix these security flaws. Draconian punishment only squelches the kind of curiosity that educators should seek to encourage in students.
The underlying issue is that classroom appliances that may be controlled wirelessly, without giving the teacher exclusive control, suffer from a defect. These defects often are fixed when a security update is released or a recall is issued, but regardless of that, such devices should always have fallbacks allowing them to be operated without wireless capabilities. Just as a television or monitor has physical buttons to turn it on or off, any appliance which is relied on to teach in the classroom should have the ability for a teacher to override the wireless functionality.
If these flaws are left unpatched, and without a teacher override option, students who learn to use the Flipper Zero aren’t so different from students in bygone years who used lower-tech or single-purpose gadgets like the TV-B-Gone to turn off televisions. Would they have been charged with crimes?
As security researchers and computer tinkerers in youth, it pains us to witness that many schools still harshly punish students for displaying useful skills, even if those skills are used in a misguided yet ultimately harmless way. This is a field in which we learn by doing, because coding bootcamps and theory can only take you so far.
Tinkering isn’t a crime. It can be guided in a constructive environment instead of leaving students with annoying pranks as their only outlet.
One article about the Utah high school incident noted the “student was referred to juvenile court on charges of electronic communication harassment and property damage for permanently disabling a teacher’s phone.” The claim that the Flipper Zero device bricked a teacher’s phone seems dubious, at best. It has been demonstrated to be capable of crashing iPhones, requiring a reboot, but if the student was able to permanently disable an iPhone he may be eligible for a significant monetary reward from Apple itself.
Again, teachers and administrators whose classrooms are disrupted by mischievous behavior are right to be upset, and to take disciplinary action. But subjecting a student to the criminal justice system for shutting off devices is disproportionate and unjustified.
This is especially true since measured remedies are available. The school IT department could be tasked with applying security updates or removing or blocking sensors such as the infrared sensor on a television. If a students’ activities with the Flipper Zero are found to be disruptive, normal and proportionate measures such as warnings, write-ups and detention could be brought to bear.
But schools also should take responsibility for providing positive outlets for students’ budding passion for technology. When students find a security vulnerability in the classroom, administrators could reward them for disclosing this fact rather than using it to cause mischief. A further reward could be given for fixing the issue, which would incentivize students to use their ingenuity to solve problems.
Pursuing a punitive route rather than one that redirects students’ skills to positive ends does nothing to actually fix the flaws that they’ve identified, and exposes the more concerning flaw of schools that have no place for independent, curious young minds.