I meant more broadly than just breaking computers, but I guess for as long as computers have been in school teenagers have been finding creative ways to break them.

Was always a BYOD kid since our school allowed it (and I think most if not all should) and I preferred using GNU/Linux over Windows so I never really did anything like this myself. I've scavenged parts from (usually ewasted) school computers before, but that's a story for a different day.

The kids in our schools were also surprisingly well behaved in this manner. It's not even that I haven't heard of kids doing stuff to their school computers elsewhere I just haven't really noticed it to be too bad where I was. Maybe a few incidents of kids picking the keys off the keyboard but otherwise not really much. I wonder if it's still the same way or if it's changed, but I guess I'll know that once I start working for a school IT department.

No doubt

Things like this were certainly better before social media, when a trend like this would be contained to a school and would be less likely to spread across the world.

I think if we knew what the capabiltiies of social media platforms would be 25+ years ago, it would certainly be something we would see coming. The idea that a teenagers telling a bunch of other teenagers hundreds of kiometeres away what dumb and dangerous idea they came up with is probably one of the more predicable things that has happened.