On school Chromebooks, there are blocks on most websites, so students can’t go on inappropriate sites or get distracted from doing their work. Since The New York Times Their website isn’t blocked, students can go onto it and play the brain-teasing but genuinely fun games and puzzles they have on there.
It became a trend to play the games on the site in late December of 2021 on the app X (formerly known as Twitter) and has made its way to other platforms such as TikTok.
“There’s like a whole TikTok Wordle player community,” sophomore Avryn Flores said.
In 2022 The New York Times bought the game because fewer people were going onto their site. Since making the purchase, The New York Times has gotten more visits on their websites because of wordle and decided to make more games, furthermore creating more buzz and excitement about the site.
The problem with these games is that now that school districts have blocked other games, people go to The New York Times to fill the void of games, and since it’s a news website it’s not blocked, so students can play them freely unless a teacher manually blocks the site on Hapara or the other sites used to do so. This creates a loophole for students to mess around and play games during school. Though it’s not all students, it could ruin it for all students in a class.
“Typically students who are off task playing games in my anecdotal research, are the students who are struggling to get the content done. They’re not the ones finishing early,” English Teacher Micheal Newton said.
Students playing The New York Times games should make sure it’s not at the expense of their learning time and opportunities.
“You should be playing them at lunch or when it’s not class time so you can get work done,” sophomore Maia Bertram said.
Playing the games after you’ve finished work in class, during lunch, before or after school hours are the appropriate times to be playing them, pun intended.