With the Omicron variant rattling school districts and case numbers across the world, and the effects of remote learning still lingering in classrooms, Superintendent Peter Smith has decided to take extra measures to increase educational and recreational outreach to the J-D community. In the coming days, new features will be added to the district’s COVID-19 Information and Updates webpage to make it more “intellectually challenging” and “fun” for students, staff, and J-D families.
“Currently, the webpage is pretty spartan, I will admit,” Superintendent Smith told YamPage. “But with the new improvements, people should find going to the website to be a fun family bonding experience and intellectually challenging.” When asked about the irony of having a “fun” webpage contain the growing case statistics, Smith offered no response.
So what exactly are these improvements, you ask? When we tried to ask Superintendent Smith, we were met with giddy resistance, with him stating it was “top secret” information. But after forcibly entering a computer science class—who we had an inkling were the masterminds behind the whole operation—we figured it out.
The students proudly told us about their project. As soon as the webpage is opened, users will be sent directly to the BuzzFeed quiz, “Answer These FUN Trivia Questions and We’ll Tell You Which COVID-19 Variant YOU Are.” Upon completion, it will provide the quizee(s) with a witty personal description in relation to their result “all based in science,” as quiz creator Antoine Faussi claims. Then, they’ll be sent back to the original webpage, where each time they move their trackpad or mouse, they will be prompted to take a not-a-robot test, specially coded so that users will need to correctly identify the infected individuals in the image—and some of them are asymptomatic! But that’s not the end of the “fun.” Approximately every 24 seconds a riddle will show up on the screen for users to solve, more often than not relating to contact tracing poorly pseudonym-ed students and staff. If you decide to close out of the window or tab in frustration, you will be treated to a version of the dinosaur game, but this time, the dinosaur is a very angry red ram, who, upon defeat, permanently locks your device on the website you tried to escape.
“It has kinda become a competition for people in class to try to make it as difficult as possible. My trick is to label the non-infected people in the robot tests as infected. It’s gonna be so funny,” freshman Mekael Hamlin said. When asked if he was planning to visit the website when it was finished, he said no, claiming that it would “take too much” of his “brain power” to try to find it on the school district’s website.
Mr. Gasparini shared everyone’s enthusiasm for the new webpage: “It’s like CoolMath4Kids; entertaining for students, yet highly educational. As an administration, we are anticipating test scores to really jump because of it, and I’m sure all of our AP teachers will see improvement in their students’ performance in class, what with all of the critical thinking skills they’ll be gaining.”He added, “We are the best high school in the world so it’s only fitting that we have the best COVID webpage in the world. We are J-D.” He then went on to take the BuzzFeed quiz again, whispering to himself that his personality was too infectious to just make him the Delta variant.
