When the cat’s away the mice will play, but a least you’ll know when they came home if you use this time clock. It’s called the Kid-e-log and [John Boxall] developed it to help a friend who wanted to keep track of their teenage children’s after school activities while they were still at work. He figured having them punch a time clock would at least let you know if they came straight home as they were supposed to. An RFID tag was issued to each (no, they didn’t implant the tags) and used to record the time. To keep fraud to a minimum the hardware has a battery back-up for its real-time clock, and the tag read events are stored to EEPROM for retention between power cycles. This doesn’t prevent common tricks like taking the reader with you, or sending your tag with a sibling, but it’s a start. See it in action after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45E-Otpule4&w=470]
[Thanks Panikos]
Talk about worst parenting in history. They sucked at raising their kids so much they need extreme measures like this? Some people should not be allowed to have children.
“Keep your kids in line with a time clock”
As opposed to some other kind of clock?
BTW if the kids are as smart as their parents, they could find the RFID spoofer on hack-a-day from a few weeks ago and program it to present both their ID’s at set intervals.
Couldn’t you simply beat your kids senseless with a regular mechanical clock until they behave?
Old tricks are the best tricks I always say.
It worked for Bing Crosby is what I’m saying…
@strider_mt2k: thanks, that made my day :)
Um… yeah… have the kids punch a timeclock. That will work. Johnny will always punch in and out. Really!
A better solution, install security cameras and a security DVR.
@wally You’ve got the point, right on the money — and I am a parent. On this side of the pond there’s a movement to try and get back to the sort parenting we recall from just a couple of decades ago (Google “free range kids”) but it’s a slow uphill battle, fighting against shock journalism and a general fear of our own shadows that it has caused.
In the USA, people under 18 years of age are legally the property of their parents. In a word, chattel.
There’s a low-level hack for this: cattle runs. Just build some barriers to direct your human property to and from their destination. High school administrators could pull double-duty as child herders.
If you’re going to take to tacitly admit that your kids deserve as much freedom as livestock, why not just drop the pretenses and take things to their logical conclusion?
What a waste of a perfectly good Arduino.
This is wonderful! I would totally make this. Of course no one but I would use it. In fact, the kids (when I have them) would probably roll their eye, and my wife would pat me on the back. But thats not really the point. It would be fun…I’ll bet this was. However, to do it right…
Octel: What about cattle prods? Cattle runs would obviously make things more efficient, but thats a bit like making beautiful straight road and then telling everyone to drive at walking pace. Why not take advantage of the added efficiency by speeding the child units along with cattle prods. That way this time tracker could be used not for silly things like trust, but as a optimization tool to optimize child unit speed.
…but then of course, being a barrier, the cattle run could easily be destroyed by zombies.
Personally, I am under the impression that our teachers are essentially cattle herders, teaching however would put them on double duty.
@ reasonable, I am glad I got to go to them, but I saw people who did it all the time, and they grew up to be unwashed heathens. And now, they are growing up little unwashed heathens that will become unwashed hordes.
This is something that simply does what it is supposed to do. Make sure that a kid is following the rules of where to be, and when to be there. Nothing evil about it, and nothing extreme either. I would worry more about the children whose parents simply relied on trust, which I can assure you is a rare commodity in teenagers of any day and age. I do not fault the teenager, that is exactly what they are supposed to be doing. They need to learn limitations, and this is simply showing them where those limitations are.
@FractalBrain
cattle prods add unnecessary aggression and harm potential to the mix. we can lure our human cattle err.. _precious offspring_ to any place at all via carefully-planned bait such as Apple products or the latest Bieber album
an alternative would be to ferry all children to and from their destinations using large unbreakable plexiglass tubes like the kind they have at banks for transporting documents. each child would be individually packaged and guaranteed aseptic
an even better high-tech solution would be to put children in maturation chambers where they will absorb cultural norms and factual information starting at birth without the risk of interaction or contamination from harmful ideas/practices
basically, something like a cross between the matrix/borg/zerg
americans hold property rights in high regard, which is why you often hear the cry of “think of the children!!”
:)
Bad parenting 101… those are going to be some messed up kids
Yeah…you could create a complex and controlling environment, watch your children in everything they do, build up a barrier of distrust and distance yourself from them, rendering them totally uncapable in the adult world…
Or you could build trust and teach them these new fangled ‘Moral Values’, like honesty, compassion, responsibility, and actually being a part of your children’s lives, not simply controlling them.
I’m not so sure how this would mess up kids anymore than having Mom, or dad in the home after they arrive some school. Generations survived with mom being home to note. Many more generations survived have both mom, and dad around the farm or the family shop for most of the day being “smothering”. This is only a tool for newer realities, like all tools it can be use poorly or used well. My guess is those commenting against this are the parents of the little turds whose crap we have to endure, because the parents don’t do the most rudimentary monitoring of their angels.