24h without a smartphone - an experiment

To read the report of the experiment, click here. 

First of all, you have to know why we decided to do the experiment. We wanted to do the “24 hours without a smartphone” experiment, because we wanted to see what a daily routine looks like without a smartphone, like for example: How do you organize meetings or how do you check the weather?

Eleven students and one teacher of the English EK-class of grade 9 were part of it and Mr. Hilleke, who was the only adult, decided to do it from Thursday 14 June 2018 to Friday 15 June 2018.

Firstly, we prepared eight questions together. During the day we answered them and evulated them. Here are the results of the questions. 

The first question was “How often do you want to use your phone?”. On the average a person wanted to use his or her phone eighteen times that day. The interesting thing about that is, that girls wanted to use their phones less often than the boys!

Now we are going to talk about the question “How did you organize your daily routine?”. We organized our daily routines by asking friends, making arrangements at school and over landline calls. Furthermore, there were some moments when we missed our smartphones, for example in bed in the evening, in the waiting room, while shopping and in other moments. But of course there were also some moments when we needed our phones, for example to make some important calls, to check the timetable, our emails or to do other different important things.

The last two questions were: How many messages did you miss and which three apps did you miss most? We found out, that every person on the average missed 53 messages the whole day, but without group chats with over 25 participants which were not included. But if we include the group chats every person  missed 203 messages. The difference is so big, because of two students only! Finally, the result of the last question:  the top missed app was Instagram, then Spotify and YouTube and after that Whatsapp and Snapchat were the most missed apps. There are of course more apps that the group missed, but those are the top 3 (5) of the group.

Finally, we would like to give our personal opinions about what we found out and what was interesting for us.

In our opinion, the experiment was a good idea, because you can see if you are addicted to your smartphone. You also can see how the people organized their daily routines in the past. What we found out is that the boys use their phones more than the girls - we didn‘t expect that, because we thought girls use their phones more and boys play more video games.  So, this was the most surprising thing we found out. 

To sum up, if you have the chance to do a project like this, do it! - It is worth it.

Jessica and Juliana (9d)