Students often find creative ways to entertain themselves throughout the long hours of school, such as playing computer games. Whether they have all of their class assignments or homework done, or they are just plain bored. Computer games are something that can reward the students when they are finished with the assignments or want something to do to fill their empty time. With Covid-19, school closures have led to the use of school work online. Along with that, many schools have issued Chromebooks as a source of online education. But, students began to take advantage of the internet. Schools had to put restriction blocks on websites such as Cool Math Games, YouTube, and other non-educational websites because of the distraction and misuse by students. Students are left with few websites to feed their hunger for computer games. One of the websites still open to the students is The New York Times. They have multiple educational games such as Spelling Bee, The Mini, Connections, and the most popular amongst students, Wordle.

Most commonly high schoolers remain in school for a large portion of their weekdays. The New York Times provides entertainment for students while maintaining an educational aspect, with some games allowing students to keep their brains engaged. In other computer games, the students mindlessly press different keys to reach a new level/stage, with little to no educational connections. While yes, some days the stress of assignments might induce the need to turn their brain off, other games create much more of a distraction. There are seven total games that are offered on The New York Times page, all with different levels of skills needed. With the various options, students are able to soothe their gaming wants. “When I have spare time in class I play New York Times Games and they help time go by faster in my classes,” said Sofia

Wolters (Senior).

The games enforce an interactive factor with the students that engages their minds. In the game Connections, the user has to group the given words to form a common connection between the words. An example of this are “bet” “chance” “risk” and “gamble” which are words that could be grouped together as “put it on the line”.There is a new “connections” level to be played daily.

Once completed the player can continue to play previous levels. Students can pick their difficulty level, as the difficulty range goes from yellow (being the easiest) to purple (being the hardest).

As much as the games are educational, they are also enjoyable. Computer games do not often have both of these features. The game spelling bee is similar to when students are assigned a vocab list, but the game makes it fun to learn.

Students should have some freedom as they are required to attend school for long periods of time every week on top of whatever extracurricular activities they also have. Allowing the students to have the ability to play these games surely makes the time more enjoyable. The New York Times is like a win-win for students and teachers as the students learn while playing games.