Kids on the 'Net

My daughter came home from school on Friday, excited to tell me about a web site one of her friends had found. It is a short flash cartoon series that they had been looking at during school time. I don't know if you have heard of it. It is called Salad Fingers, by David Firth. It can be found, amongst other things, here. It is building up quite a following, including parodies, Fan Fict, clones, Lego models, and served as the inspiration of other animations. It even has a wikipedia entry. Just do a Google Search for "Salad Fingers", and you will find your bounty.

Now, have a look at some of the episodes. When I saw them I thought, "weird, but cool, and yet slightly disturbing, which can be cool too." My second thought was, "the teacher let the kids watch this at school?"

I don't personally have a problem with it, but I could imagine teachers and some parents getting quite offended if they knew their children were watching this at school. I asked my daughter what her teacher was doing when they were watching this, to which she informed me that her normal teacher was not there, and that the Computers teacher was taking them at the time. She didn't enlighten me as to what the Computers teacher was doing, but she seemed to imply that the teacher knew what was happening. The teacher probably just thought the kids were looking at harmless fun animations, without really looking at what they were doing.

I found the whole thing quite amusing, and I was happy to see that my daughter seems to be developing the same appreciation for the darkly absurd that I have. I find it funny what kids come home from school with knowledge of something totally unexpected. Most times you will find that it is knowledge that has been gained from other children.

I do have one doubt about this whole thing, though. It clearly shows that the children are not very closely supervised when they are on the internet at school. This could be a worry.

DPS

P.S. Another great flash animation I have seen is the Banana song at rathergood.com, One of my all time favourite internet songs. It gets stuck in your head. I challenge you to watch it, and then not have "I bought the wrong bananas, I bought the wrong bananas (I bought I bought the wrong bananas)" going through your head afterwards. Go on, I dare you!