BA-Abschlussvortrag, Anton Vlasjuk, Ort: Online, Datum: 06.04.2022, Zeit: 11:45 Uhr

Smartphones are an integral part of our lives today, increasing the speed of the information exchange, but also leading to cognitive overload. Due to their importance in everyday life, it is, however, unclear how smartphones affect learning. Other works already investigate the effects of smartphones by using Digital Phenotyping, a method to collect data characterised by the moment-to-moment quantification of people’s characteristics in situ, in other areas of life such as mental health but there is a lack thereof in learning: Do smartphones improve or hinder the process of learning? With the development of a mobile application that uses Digital Phenotyping this work tries to provide a basis for similar future works as well as to gain first insights on the effects of smartphones by using the app for a conducted study. Thus, this work explores the development of this mobile application including its back end that entails a server, a reverse proxy, and a database. The complete architecture, functionality, and interaction of all components are discussed and explained. Furthermore, as aforementioned, a study conducted at Ulm University examines the effects smartphones have on the process of learning. Despite the shortcoming of a small sample size of collected data, the study as well as the development of the mobile application pointed out technical challenges regarding the future of such applications since more and more restrictions are imposed by the smartphones’ operating systems (e.g., new permissions are needed, background processes are harder to maintain, control over certain functionalities such as listening to notifications is limited, etc.).