Fremd physics classes team with Motorola on product research
As the Motorola Backflip has recently hit the market through AT&T, Motorola partnered with William Fremd High School's senior Advanced Physics classes to connect education with the professional world through a teenage perspective on the new phone.
"The (student) learning is the best part of this experience," said Fremd High School Advanced Physics Teacher Jason English.
"They learn so much about working in teams, meeting deadlines, analyzing real data, and making presentations that have real-world significance. Students rarely get to have this type of professional experience in a core subject area."
As students have witnessed the value of science in their every day lives thanks to this project, some have decided to pursue science in their future.
"The teenage perspective is important because the teenage market is already large, and is continually expanding," said student Sheila McDonnell. "Plus teens are more likely to use new technologies and buy new phones than adults are, so they make up an extremely large portion of cell phone consumers."
The students in the fourth hour class of Advanced Physics at Fremd High School have been gathering survey data and conducting interviews of fellow classmates in order to obtain an unbiased overview of how teenagers would evaluate the phone.
"We came up with a survey that evaluated what teenagers' interests were in phones and how often they use things on the phone," student Garret Muller said. "We included questions about how long they keep their phones, applications and their opinions on audio, visual and music quality.
"We also asked them to tell us about their current phones and what they would want to change about them. We asked them about their preferences and what they would like to see in a future phone."
The researchers found differences in what teens and adults look for in a phone.
"Teens put a lot of focus on the phone's appearance, whereas we think adults put more of a focus on durability," Muller said. "Teens still ranked durability second in importance, but the appearance was ranked most important."
With this information, students in the first hour Advanced Physics class at Fremd High School tested the actual Motorola Backflip to see if the phone not only had an appearance that teenagers desired, but met their other expectations. These students tested the quality of the phone's applications and features, the usability of the phone, the durability of the phone, and the phone's hardware and battery.
In many cases, students were impressed by the results of their tests.
"We had students try out MotoBLUR, which is a new application that incorporates all of a person's social networks like 'Facebook,' 'Twitter,' and 'MySpace' into one, and provides the person quick access to any of the social networks," said student Kevin Ruehrdanz.
"Students found this useful and didn't have difficulty in using it, which is definitely a plus considering the increasing importance of social networking to teenagers."
Once tests were completed, students shared their conclusions with the other Advanced Physics class, to see if the results of the tests would prove that the Motorola Backflip could be successful in the teen market.
But, instead of just providing criticism for Motorola's new phone, these students are creating designs for a next generation phone that will incorporate all of the positive aspects of the Backflip and even suggest new ideas to incorporate into a phone.
In order to present their findings to Motorola, students compiled an extensive report and presentation. They also gave a presentation to Motorola and AT&T representatives about the Motorola Backflip on June 1.
English, the physics teachers, thinks the student data will help Motorola.
"(The data) is not only good quality, but it is current," English said. "Giving Motorola current data must be helpful."
Besides providing Motorola with valuable data, the project has provided the students with an important learning experience.
"I'm planning on majoring in mechanical engineering next year at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign," said student Patrick Duffy. "I can see myself doing this kind of work in the future, and I would love to have a job where I could work with a team and apply my discoveries to real, everyday life."
Overall, as students prepared to present their findings to Motorola, they were excited to make use of their discoveries and grateful for the opportunity to do so.