A case for smartphone reuse to augment elementary school education

The rapid growth of information technology has led to substantial economic and societal benefits. Unfortunately, rapid improvements in technology has also led to an unsustainable "disposable" model in which devices are replaced in a matter of months. This model is especially problematic in the cell phone area, where over a billion phones are manufactured per year. To mitigate the impact of future devices, we propose a design for reuse model in which obsolete devices will be reused for a class of applications that can be satisfied with older, less reliable technology. In particular, we find a good match between the reuse of smartphones and educational applications at the primary school level. Our experiments on the HTC Nexus One indicate that the resource requirements of educational applications, including functional features, storage, memories, power and network communication can all be well satisfied by repurposed smartphones. By reusing smartphones for several years as PDAs for education, we can substantially amortize the carbon footprint of manufacturing, which traditionally dominates the footprint of usage in these devices.