Photo credit: Randy Barber | Boulder Valley School District
High school is getting wild, but not the way you think. In classrooms filled with algebra struggles and notebooks full of doodles, a clever teen pulls out a paperclip with a mischievous smile. With a fast poke into their school Chromebook’s port, smoke rises, sparks fly, and the room fills with gasps and laughter. Say hello to the TikTok Chromebook Challenge, the viral prank setting laptops ablaze and sending school admins scrambling for fire extinguishers.
If you’ve been blissfully unaware of this digital dumpster fire, allow me to catch you up. The Chromebook Challenge, hashtagged as #ChromebookChallenge or the slightly more ironic #ChromebookDurabilityTest, is a TikTok-fueled prank where students shove metal objects—think paperclips, pushpins, or even mechanical pencil lead—into their Chromebook’s ports. The goal? To short-circuit the device, ideally making it smoke, spark, or, in the most dramatic cases, catch fire.
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Why, you ask? Well, it’s the classic teen cocktail of boredom, bravado, and the siren call of internet clout. Some kids are chasing TikTok fame, others just want to skip class via an impromptu fire drill. One particularly charred Chromebook video, viewed 2.6 million times, came with the caption, “Get me out of this school.” Mission accomplished, I suppose, until the repair bill arrives.
The fallout has been as wild as you’d expect. Schools across the US—from Colorado to New Jersey—report dozens of incidents. Denver Public Schools alone clocked over 30 attempts, ranging from fizzled failures to full-on smoke shows. In Belleville, New Jersey, a 15-year-old was slapped with third-degree arson charges after their Chromebook stunt forced a school evacuation. Meanwhile, a Connecticut middle schooler landed in the hospital after inhaling toxic smoke from a mangled laptop. Lithium-ion batteries, it turns out, don’t take kindly to being poked with scissors.
TikTok’s response? They’ve yanked the #ChromebookChallenge tag, redirecting searches to a stern safety warning: “Some online challenges can be dangerous, disturbing, or even fabricated.” But the videos still lurk under vaguer tags like “Chromebook durability,” and the trend’s spread to Instagram hasn’t helped. Schools are fighting back with parental letters, disciplinary threats, and repair bills that can hit $300 a pop. In Stratham, New Hampshire, one district reported 15 incidents in just three days, voiding warranties faster than you can say “budget cuts.”
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