iPhone 7 & 7 Plus are *technically* repairable—experience tells us otherwise
With contributions from Kenny Graves After watching the iFixit video to help us get ready for the iPhone 7 & 7 Plus repairs, we felt confident that we could tackle this repair in under 45 minutes. We quickly realized that the waterproofing presented a big challenge to our process. We were successful, but it took *literally* hours for our student…
Restart Center Year 2 Impact Report
Adding onto last year’s numbers, we’ve made big strides in our Restart Center this year. Over the past two years, our students have volunteered 603 hours to save more than 205 devices from landfills. Through their hard work, they’ve prevented 566 lbs of e-waste and 34405 lbs of carbon dioxide emissions. You can view the full report in more detail…
Organizing a 5th Grade “Repair Fair”
At the end of the school year in 2016, 70+ 5th graders gave new life to their laptops by replacing the existing hard drives with new solid state drives. Participation in the Restart Party helped young students see how repair can save a computer from premature replacement. The upgraded 2012 MacBook Pros were kept in service for the 2016-2017 class…
Experimenting with the Fairphone 1 in the US
I’ve been happily plodding along with an old 2013 Android device, routinely dropping it with no ill effects. My luck finally ran out a few weeks ago, and I shattered the screen. Much to my dismay, there don’t seem to be any OEM parts available for the device through my regular suppliers. A device is only repairable as long as…
Identity, Privacy & Privilege: Using Data to Discuss Systemic Racism
We’ve been working on a framework for a computer science curriculum grounded in global perspectives and multiple identities, with the ultimate goal of fostering ethical innovation. Our first activity to help students think about the intersection of privacy, identity, and data is a card game (available for available for remixing and reuse here). The game, which can be played in…
Middle School Restart Center Curriculum
Last year, we opened a Restart Center for our high school students, ages 14-18. This year, we decided to extend our repair tutoring center into the middle school, with ages 11-14. We were able to reuse many lessons learned from our work with high school students, but we had to tweak our launch slightly to be developmentally appropriate and to align with…
Restart Center Year 1 Impact Report
Technically, we started up in November 2015…so this impact report is even more impressive given the students have only been repairing devices for 8 months in between vacations, breaks, finals, and all of the natural schedule disruptions that come with being a high school student. We received a big end-of-the year boost by replacing 70 hard drives in 2012 MacBook Pros…
The Repair Process (Staff Workshop Recap)
Today we taught staff how to repair personal devices, with step by step instructions from diagnosis to installation. We’ve recapped the process below for participants and for others who are up for a repair adventure. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all potential issues and their solutions; it is an orientation to the repair process itself. Identifying your product and…