At a high school that lies within an hour’s drive from the University of Maryland, the Round Table, the student newspaper at Middletown High School, declared an “app-ocalypse” during lunch periods at the school, referring to the apps and games students play on their smartphones before they begin eating their lunches.
This is the first article in a series about what’s going on in the great schools that are located near colleges whose women’s basketball teams made the NCAA Final Four. First up, the University of Maryland, College Park.
The 2012 enrollment was a little more than 37,000 students, and the university admits about 47 percent of students who apply. The university’s Computer Science Department, highly ranked among US universities, recently hosted its 24th annual programming contest for high school students. Entries to “Despicable Me” types of problems were judged on correctness and speed of submission.
Games like Candy Crush and Flappy Bird, of course, are programs written for smartphones. Candy Crush is reported to be one of the most popular games at Middletown as well as worldwide. In fact, the 93 million users, who play at least once a day, outnumber the population of Australia, the Huffington Post reports.
The other most popular game at Middletown, Flappy Bird, was called “addicting” in a recent review:
I have a love/hate relationship with this game and it’s so addicting. It’s a great game though. I can’t get past 15 🙁
But at least one student at Middletown says it’s not so much the addictive qualities of the game as the addictive qualities of competition. “I find Flappy Bird not really addicting, but a contest,” a junior was quoted as saying. “I hear everyone having scores higher than mine so I keep playing just to try and beat them.”
Flappy bird was taken down suddenly, just 28 days after it hit the Top 10 on the App Store. Before its abrupt demise, it had been downloaded more than 50 million times and received more than 16 million tweets.
The game was also a cash cow for its creator, Dong Nguyen. His revenue from ads was about $50,000 a day, but he also received death threats from people who said the game’s graphics were stolen and felt it was wrong for him to profit off the work of others without compensating them.
An easier version was uploaded to the App Store, but it’s unpopular with the game’s original following—so much so that smartphones with the original version of the game command exorbitant auction prices on eBay, Mashable reported in recounting the rare story of Flappy Bird.
Jeffrey Colsh, an Advanced Placement psychology teacher at Middletown High School, said people choose a simple game because it hooks them. “Chemicals get released, and they would be the same ones released as if you’re taking a drug when playing the game,” he was quoted as saying.
“I can only describe it with one word: pure bliss,” said one math teacher at the high school, counting errors notwithstanding.
The school has a “gaming club” that allows students to share experiences with their favorite games, like Minecraft, Starcraft, and Halo.
