Your school may be sitting on a goldmine of learning opportunities, in the form of old smartphones.
It’s been 15 years since Apple introduced the smartphone era, and over the first 10 years a huge variety of phones were created; and consumers purchased, on average, a new phone every 2-3 years, putting their old phone in a drawer, or worse, in the rubbish bin.
A variety of rescued phones from Urban Miners.
This is awful from a waste perspective - the time, energy, and resources which go into making these small computers is massive - but potentially beneficial if they can be utilised by students.
I’ve been rescuing mobile phones & tablets for Urban Miners, a community e-waste recycling project in Cambridge/Te Oko Horoi, for over a year now, and have found multiple opportunities for using rescued phones for learning within our local schools:
Feature phones (old mobile phones with physical buttons and no touchscreen) - with the batteries removed, these can be used for family play in ECE & junior classes (see the Playing With Phones section in our DT for Juniors course), where tauira (students) are learning about letters, numbers, and their uses.
Taking photos/videos/audio recordings - old Android smartphones may no longer have support for apps like YouTube, but they can still be used with Year 3+ for capturing their work & reflections, creating media projects, and learning about file formats & management in the process. Their small size makes them more manageable than tablets.
Mobile App Development - Year 6+ ākonga (learners) can create & test complex apps which use the built-in sensors (e.g. compass, accelerometer, light) to make games, useful tools, and learn to code in the process, using MIT’s App Inventor. No WiFi needed for the phones - just install the companion app on the phones, the desktop app on laptops, and connect via USB.
Installing custom operating systems - teach Year 10+ tauira to breathe new life into old phones, by installing an open-source build of Android, such as LineageOS. Students learn about recovery/fastboot modes, bootloaders, how to factory reset a device, and identifying reputable sources.
Device security - the number of phones I’ve been able to access without any PIN code or password is shocking. Learning how to set up this basic security precaution, as well as how to wipe the data from your phone, is a must for Year 6+, as preparation for personal phone use during their tween/teen years.
Phone repair & unmaking - sometimes all a phone needs is a clean, or a part replacement, to restore it. You can easily purchase low-cost mobile phone repair kits online, and with a few jar lids for keeping track of screws and a hair-dryer (for softening glue which is used in more modern phones), you can have a successful learning experience with Year 7+ ākonga, as they demystify how phones are put together.
Cambridge High School students take apart a tablet.
To acquire old Android smartphones, simply make a call out to your local community, and see what you get back. The phones will need to be charged, tested, data-wiped, and factory reset before use with ākonga (see Steps 1-4 of my Mobile Device Processing Checklist).
You’ll also need microUSB cables for charging phones and connecting to laptops. If you have a local e-waste recycler, make contact to see if they can support you with this.
If you have any questions about implementing any of this, please get in touch at geoff@omgtech.co.nz
Author: Geoff Bentley