What Happens When You Get Into Kahoots With The Knowledge You Learn?
At the beginning of the Winter 2018 semester, my professor taught us how robust online servers can fail due to a simple exploitation. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)Attack is an attempt to render a website unusable by flooding it with a massive amount of traffic. This is usually done by bots, computer programs posing as multiple users accessing the website in a short amount of time.
Throughout my course, it became routine to end the class with a pop quiz. Now the professor is quite creative, and used a popular platform that was energetic and competitive — a great way to engage the class. The platform is called Kahoot, a game-based tool for using technology to administer quizzes, surveys, and more with real time feedback from the students.
A small portion of the grade in this course is to participate online within the course. I was struggling to figure out how to fulfil this task aside from emails, and I realized I could get about 50 “friends” to help me participate online (I mean it most likely doesn’t count towards that mark, but it seemed like a fun idea).
After curiosity struck and a quick Google search, I came across a Chrome extension called Kahoot Smasher Beta.
After installing, the setup seemed straight forward. Simply click on the extension which opens up a new tab, type in your game pin and smash away. I noticed in the settings gear that up to 256 bots could be active, that may have crashed the game. As I wanted to see what type of questions were in this week’s game, I left the settings at default.
Once the bots entered the game, I returned back to the original Kahoot tab to compete and see if us humans could beat the bots, much like the plot of the Terminator movie series.
I guess now would be a good time to put in some of the things I heard as I tried to control the suppressed giggles.
- “Oh someone shared the link online, we have much other players. Zombie players”
- “People are still joining! i’ll start it when we hit 100”
- “COME ON 97!”
- (Student to Student to Student) “What’s answer” “I don’t know” “Well TOO. BAD.”
- “I think Kesha is a bot”
- “Pitbull? That guy that uses a lot of autotune?”
- “I’m guessing the bots are getting 25% of the questions right, let’s keep going”
- “I’m 10 points behind marsbars, darn”
As with everything, all good things come to an end. It was fun to see how the class reacted, I'm glad the kahoot server did not overload with 50 bots. I wonder what would have happened with 256 bots? With that being said:
This was a one time experiment. I uninstalled the extension. If this happens again, it was not me!
It was also unintentional that the class got a bonus mark. I was simply doing this just for fun. Sorry Professor. Hope those who read this have an amazing day!
