Access to Technology
Perhaps the most common computing solution students and technologists come up with to solve problems in real life is to “build an app.”
Overview
For many students, this comes from a place of good intentions but students do not always think about who will be excluded just from their decision to make an app (which e.g. will target those with smartphones). See e.g. Kate Crawford’s great example on issues with Street Bump (an app that collects information about potholes in neighborhoods via their app on smartphones inside of a car on a road and then sends aggregated information to the relevant municipal authority to help redirect resources to fix areas with pothole problems). As pointed out by Crawford, just assuming that a user has a smartphone disproportionately excludes older and poorer segments of the population -- e.g. as per a 2019 Pew study 29% of households with <30K income do not have access to a smartphone, while only 3% of households with income of 100K+ do not have a smartphone. The numbers are even more dire for high-speed Internet access.
