The Story of Electronics

How long

15 minutes

Who it is for

Secondary

What you need

Internet, a computer and a projector.
Notebooks for sketching and notes. Background for the teacher: a life cycle analysis follows a product through every stage of being made, used and thrown away, and measures what goes in and what comes out at each one. For a phone that means counting everything used to build it — glass, metals, plastics, fuel, water — and everything the factory puts out, from emissions to offcuts to effluent. The stage that turns out to cost the most is rarely the one students expect.

What it is for

Students follow an electronic device — a phone, a computer — through its whole life, from mine to dump.

The words

Sustainability, the three pillars, life cycle analysis.

The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.

How it runs

The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.

01

Play the short film 'The Story of Electronics'.
02

Students sketch the life cycle of an everyday device — a phone, a television, a computer — from what the film gave them.
03

Ask them to show the sketch and say which stage they would change, and how. Then put the harder question: what happens to the phone in their pocket when they are finished with it, where does it go, and whose hands take it apart?

Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.

The Story of Electronics

https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/sustainabilitysolutions/wp-content/uploads/sit es/15/2016/06/Life-Cycle-Analysis-of-Electronic-Devices.pdf

Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.

Where to go from here.

Next session

The theme

All eight themes

Understand the data