Hands On Learning: iPhone Repairs

About a year ago I upgraded my phone. I saved my old phone, with its cracked screen. I put it with my wife’s old phone, which was also out of service with a bulging battery and a broken screen.

It took awhile to get to it, but this week, I finally pulled the phones back out and let Jack (7) and Chi (5) have a hands on lesson in technology by repairing the phones. 

I ordered screen replacements from SANKA and batteries from ScandiTech.

With guidance from three different videos (replacing a screen, replacing a battery, repairing a home button), we tackled the project. We started before dinner and didn’t finish until more than an hour after bedtime. In total it probably took us close to two hours, far from the three minutes in the tutorial videos.

For us the biggest setbacks were losing the incredibly tiny screws inside the phone, which happened not once, not twice, not even three times, but FOUR times. Four times we managed to drop them off the table. Remarkably we found them all again. Tiffany even found the one that fell in the trash that I thought for sure was a goner.

Watching the boys work was rewarding. They were surprisingly dextrous with the small tools (though not without incident—remember those four lost screw?), and at one point along the way before I even knew it Jack switched the home button on the old screen to the new screen.

As for myself, I was pleased that I didn’t take over and turn the repairs into my project. I let them lead, and I didn’t worry that they would break something since these phones were already heading for the disposal bin (Tiffany’s had in fact been in the disposal bin until I pulled it back out wondering if we could fix it). I did handle pulling out the old battery and sticking in the new one, and once we were an hour past bedtime and had found our fourth lost screw, I also made sure to get screws started before they tightened them. We were really needing to wrap up.

I think the boys were really pleased with themselves and especially thrilled to have phones. We’re planning to let them use them for listening to music, playing games, and studying scriptures. We are very interested in helping them start now to develop a healthy, safe, useful relationship with technology. I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I’m impressed by the formative impact on Jobs of being around his dad and other engineers in Silicon Valley playing around with electronic products like ham radios. I’m hopeful this is good exposure for our boys to understand that devices like phones are things people invent and build. 

We were relieved at the end when the phones booted up and everything seemed to work. The SANKA screens are decent, though you can tell the brightness of the screen and clarity of colors is subpar, and most disappointingly is that they don’t have a connection to activate the front camera. So on the next go round we’d look for another option. ScandiTech on the other hand I found very impressive; the batteries came in these quality little boxes with foam cutouts surrounding each tool.