Superhero skills

paperback writer said:

Many thanks for these suggestions. Would it be possible for the villain to install a programme that controlled the countdown and after a bit of searching around the hero manages to locate the programme and uninstall it just in time?

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If you want to be semi-technical and have the hero stop the clock in the nick of time (and assuming it's a Windows laptop), you could have the hero work out that the bomb timer program was using the Windows Time service (that's built into Windows) for the countdown timing. The hero accesses the list of Windows services (the command services.msc will do that), finds the Windows Time service, sees that it's running and stops and disables the time service just in the nick of time, thus stooping the countdown. The hero can then uninstall the rogue program to make everything safe.

That's not actually what the Windows Time service is for, but it's close enough to reality for your target age group. You can have the hero groping around before realising that the Windows Time service might be the answer....

That is a good thought ubuysa

I teach basic Computer Science to 11-13 year olds and we use BBC microbits (only because they were free!) Actually one of my more creative students created a countdown timer on it. The microbic has 3 inputs that he used, It randomly selected which one would deactivate the timer and if you selected the wrong one, it displayed boom. If using that idea, someone could plug in a USB cable, find the code and get it to display the value of the random variable and disconnect that one.

Just a thought

jerpers said:

That is a good thought ubuysa

I teach basic Computer Science to 11-13 year olds and we use BBC microbits (only because they were free!) Actually one of my more creative students created a countdown timer on it. The microbic has 3 inputs that he used, It randomly selected which one would deactivate the timer and if you selected the wrong one, it displayed boom. If using that idea, someone could plug in a USB cable, find the code and get it to display the value of the random variable and disconnect that one.

Just a thought

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That, to me, makes more sense than a Windows/Linux type computer.

I mean they fail at the first hurdle if Windows / Linux is locked...

If it's not locked for any reason then you could always connect it to a phone's wireless hotspot, and install a remote-control software for sidekick to remote into. We'll bypass the whole admin/root requirements

Many thanks everyone for the detailed responses. It has been very helpful and much appreciated.