Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: How many phones are there…?

10 minutes

Find Out: What’s the current situation?

10 minutes

Take Action: Sustainable designing

10 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions

Students will:

understand the environmental impact of mobile phone production
explore innovative, sustainable design solutions for future mobile phones.

Success criteria

Students can:

design a sustainable mobile phone concept that addresses specific environmental issues identified in the lesson
present a clear and engaging pitch that effectively communicates the benefits and feasibility of the redesigned phone
evaluate the sustainability and creativity of different phone redesigns using a scoring rubric.

Tune In: How many phones are there…?

Step 1

Invite students to silently guess how many active mobile phones are in their family. List the numbers one to ten on your whiteboard. Tell the class that you will be counting up from the number one. Students should raise their hands when you call out the number of phones in their homes. As students raise their hands, create a class tally on the board against the numbers you have listed.

Add up your class mobile phone total, explaining your working as you go. Share the class total with the students.

Because mobile phones can be a status symbol, in some classes the number of phones in a family may be a sensitive subject. You might want students to have their eyes closed during the hands-up activity to ensure this doesn’t cause discomfort in your class.

Step 2

Now that you have a class total, explain that you are going to use your class as a random sample to estimate how many phones might be in the school community. Tell students that you will be multiplying the class total by the number of classes in the school.

Perform this multiplication on the board, talking students through your working.

Step 3

Now that you have a school estimate of mobile phones, invite students to think about what would happen if we did this maths for every school in Australia. The number would be huge! If you would like to make a more informed estimate you can note that in 2023, the ABS said there were 4,086,998 students enrolled in 9,629 schools in Australia.

Share with the class that it is thought that at least 5.4 billion people worldwide have at least one mobile subscription. (Source)

That doesn’t include all the unused phones in drawers in homes across the world.

Numeracy extension:

If you want to show students how big a billion is, the following clip can help students (and adults!) visualise the enormity of the number:

Big NUMBERS & COUNTING for KIDS! (FUN Math Learning Video for Children) - Learning Time Fun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHyiRVQGqpc)

Step 4

Invite students to do a quick think-pair-share around this provocation:

Why is it an issue that there are so many mobile phones in the world?

During the sharing sessions, students may suggest that we need a lot of material and effort to make these phones. Students may also identify that there are non-renewable materials in every phone. You could also share some of the information from the Teacher Content Information to support this discussion.

Conclude this part of the lesson by suggesting that although we might find phones useful, we can be smarter about how we build and replace our phones to make sure we minimise the problems that your students have identified.

Extension opportunity:

To expand on the ideas from this first part of the lesson, consider screening the following clip, which explains what is inside a mobile phone.

What’s a smartphone made of? - Kim Preshoff - Ted-Ed (youtube.com/watch?v=eIdJ22AfsO8)\

Find Out: What’s the current situation?

Step 1

In this part of the lesson, students will work in teams to create an idea for a sustainable phone of the future. First, they need to understand what the parts are in a mobile phone are and how they work.

Display the image of a mobile phone that has been taken apart on the attached visual explainer and explain that the parts shown on are pretty simplified. If it was a more detailed represenatation it could include components like the microphone, antenna and keyboard.

If you want to give your students a more in-depth overview you could watch the following video which shows an incredibly detailed look into the inside of a smartphone.

What's Inside a Smartphone? - Branch Education (youtube.com/watch?v=fCS8jGc3log)

Step 2

Invite students to look at the PMI Chart in the Student Worksheet and explain that they will be researching the parts of a phone that interest them most and completing a PMI chart evaluating those parts.

On the board, demonstrate how you might fill in the PMI chart, focusing on the glass used in the phone screen using the information below:

Plus (P)	Minus (M)	Interesting (I)
Usually made from hardened glass and is recyclable	Uses petroleum in production	If it is smashed it can be replaced in most phones without throwing away the whole phone

Step 3

Divide your students into small groups of approximately three or four, and invite groups to select a part of the phone to research and begin filling in the PMI chart. You might like to allocate one part of the phone to each group to ensure your class gets a thorough overview of an entire phone.

Step 4.

Do a quick whip around the room to get the highlights from each group’s research. You may want to set a 30-second timer for each group to keep things on track.

Take Action: Sustainable designing

Step 1

Explain to the class that they will now be coming up with an idea for a more sustainable mobile phone of the future. Groups are to use the information that they have gathered from their PMI chart as a starting point for their idea.

Let students know that this phone idea needs to take one of the negatives that they identified and find a way to solve it. The idea does not have to be something students could really create, but it needs to resolve the issue(s) that the group identified.

Extension opportunity:

Depending on the amount of time you have available to dedicate to this task you might like students to take their learnings from the entire class discussion to create an entire sustainable phone of the future. Or allocate one part to each group so you end up with a whole design.

Step 2

To get students thinking, share the following example of a future phone idea with the class:

I found that the plastics in phones are harmful to the environment, so our phone idea is a wristband that projects a screen onto the palm of your hand. This greatly reduces the amount of plastic needed in the screen and phone cover.

Invite the class to go back to their PMI charts and look for issues and opportunities around the parts of the phone they researched. They should work as a team to brainstorm as many solutions as they can come up with to these issues. At this stage, students should use 'blue sky' thinking by writing down every idea that comes up.

Step 3

After brainstorming, invite groups to take a few minutes to go over their ideas and work together to select one that they like best. If there are just too many good ideas in a single group to pick just one, allow students to form even smaller subgroups to explore more of their ideas.

For inspiration on a future phone, you might like to share the following websites with your group

62 Eco-friendly charging devices (trendhunter.com/slideshow/ecofriendly-charging-devices)
Body Energy as a Power Source (phys.org/news/2017-10-body-energy-power-source.html).

Step 4

Explain to the students that they will need to create a labelled diagram of their phone idea and create a 60-second pitch to convince the class why their product is the way of the future. They can use this Pitch Perfect Factsheet to help them prepare.

Encourage students to use the full force of their imagination. If they need some inspiration, show them this TED-Ed video.

The shape-shifting future of the mobile phone - Fabian Hemmert - Ted-Ed (youtube.com/watch?v=zJQsXxbZEiI)

Step 5

Once the designs are complete, assemble the class to watch each other's presentations. Invite each group to share their 60-second pitch to a group of ‘expert entrepreneurs’. Your expert entrepreneurs could be the rest of the class or it could be a group of adults like other teachers/principals or parents.

You might like to run this activity like ‘Shark Tank’ where the funding ‘sharks’ provide feedback and negotiate specific agreements with the applicants.

Step 2

The expert entrepreneurs will then use the scoring rubric on the Student Worksheet to decide which team has the best design for the sustainable mobile phone of the future and delivers the best pitch.

Opportunities for extension:

Students could build a prototype of their mobile phone using recycled materials.
If you have coding or electronics expertise in your school, you might choose a design for the students to work towards building. This might not be the whole phone – you could focus purely on an app or specific component.
Students might wish to investigate what is happening in the real world with the future of mobile technology. You could conduct a class inquiry into this topic.
Invite students to investigate some of the major brands' environmental impacts and initiatives using the MobileMuster website (mobilemuster.com.au/about-us/).

Provisions for learning support:

Group students in a way that allows peer support where needed. This may mean that some students prefer to work alone.
For students who find complex tasks overwhelming, you might like to get them to focus on one aspect of a future phone, such as energy source or user-friendly features.
For students who would prefer a research project, you could get them to investigate modular phones such as the Fairphone.

When coming up with ideas for their phone of the future, you could provide students with the following thought starters:
- Circuits in a phone are made of precious metals, so our phone...
- Batteries in phones are charged from home power which is often from coal fire power, so our phone …
- Phone screens can often crack and need to be replaced, so our phone …
- Some people upgrade their phone for a better camera when the rest of the phone is still fine, so our phone …

Reflection

Reflect on this lesson with your students by asking them to choose two or three of these questions to answer:

What did my group accomplish? What was my role?
What is important about what we did?
What new skills did I learn? Where could I use these skills again?
What could I do differently next time?
What knowledge did I collect? How could I use this knowledge again?

Designing Phones of the Future

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Summary

Learning intentions:

Students will...

Success criteria:

Students can...

Lesson guides and printables

Lesson Details

Skills

Curriculum Mapping

Resources Required

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Additional Info

Related Professional Learning

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