CATALYST Students Unfiltered: Sophia
Enjoy the following Q&A with a Summer 2022 alumni, Sophia, where we explore her inspiration for her Change Project and the interdependence between technology, behaviour, and mental health.
Students’ Change Projects can take all shapes and sizes and are worked on consistently throughout CATALYST programmes to allow students to absorb new insights and perspectives from their global cohort. The result? In Sophia’s case, a fully functioning Google Chrome extension designed to help children and teenagers build healthy and productive habits on the internet.
Enjoy the following Q&A with Sophia, a member of our founding cohort based in London and currently a student at Stanford Online High School, in which we explore her inspiration for her browser extension and the interdependence between technology, behaviour, and mental health.
Sophia’s Change Project:
What was the problem you were trying to address?
Today, in the age of increased social media usage and COVID-19, there are more distractions than ever for students. Ever since the pandemic and lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, schools have been making the switch to online. However, with this seemingly adequate solution, many problems arose. Students who were already facing distractions in school now had to contend with the entirety of the internet at their fingertips. The percentage of teenagers who use social media more than once a day has doubled in 6 years, and social media addiction is increasing at an alarming rate.
The direct consequences of students having access to a computer during all of their classes are that more and more students are becoming distracted, and lack understanding of the content of their classes. As a person who has either part or full-time attended online classes for 6 years, I've seen this issue first-hand even before the pandemic occurred.
And what was your solution?
My solution offers a mix of technological and behavioural tools. Over several months I have helped create Sssread, a Google Chrome extension that ‘gamifies’ the online browsing experience to promote productivity and motivate users. Developed by a team of 6 middle and high schoolers who understand the effects of COVID-19 all too well, Sssread allows users to earn points for each word that they read.
Sssread is currently designed with teenagers and children in mind; they have the most issues with unhealthy internet habits. Though the gamified system appeals to all generations, it is most effective with younger generations - we know they are receptive to reward-based content and positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement.
Upon release, Sssread will work on forming partnerships with schools, influencers, companies/workplaces, and other stakeholders who support productivity. Sssread’s goal is to reach as many students, teenagers, children, and adults as possible - and ensure they have fun while using it!
How did you come up with your Change Project idea?
The initial way that my Change Project idea was developed was actually from a hackathon some friends and I participated in. The task was to make something that will change the world for good. As we were brainstorming we all came to the simple agreement: reading is a good thing. And from there the idea really kicked off.
I think the extension itself is designed for people like my cohort who are used to doing everything online, so much so that it has stopped being beneficial in a way. Internet usage is a very strange thing in that it's simultaneously one of the most productive ways you can spend your time and also one of the least productive ways you can spend your time.
I've seen a lot of things that say, oh, children should just stop using the internet. And that's obviously not the solution. The solution rather is to promote the kind of habits that we want to have on the internet - just as we promote healthy video game habits or healthy eating habits. In those cases, the solution is not just, oh yeah, just don't eat junk food at all, or don't play video games at all. It's about moderating it. It's regulating it, and it's figuring out the best way to work on it.
What do you think are the benefits of being a young person in your position?
I would say that as a young person, my view on the internet is very different to adults working in technology right now. But I wouldn't say I'm either better or worse than someone who is older than me because they have their own perspectives and skills in life that they've acquired that they can use to solve problems. But my input would be about how young people see and use the internet specifically.
There is a lack of communication and understanding with young people, specifically teenagers, who often find themselves unable to relate with developers of current technology, and believe that the technology would thus be irrelevant (as a teenager myself I can confirm this). With regard to how you promote these habits with young people, I would say I'm more qualified than someone who's older, simply because someone who's older hasn't had the experience of actually growing up with technology.
These days, from the moment you're born, you have an iPhone - the iPhone came out before I was born. I've been using technology for my entire life, and there are definitely unique experiences associated with that, that older people just won’t be able to understand. And I think that's gonna be true in a few decades as well.
In the same way, though, I will not be able to understand what the youngest generation has to, or will have to, deal with. And that's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing either. It just is. And I would say that my contributions are equally important overall, but with the lens of just young people specifically? Yes, I have an advantage.
Have your goals for the future changed? What do you think your future looks like?
You know, they change all the time! I've never really had my future set in stone and working on this project hasn't particularly changed that. I do see some things happening in my future… like publishing this extension, something which was really hazy a few years ago when I started coming up with this.
I would say in terms of personal goals, I would love to work more on extensions, especially Google Chrome extensions. And even though I've always been interested in technology, it's never really been a reality until recently. So I also want to always be progressing no matter what my future looks like, like expanding and contributing to whatever technology I work with etc.
I also think the psychological perspective on technology, and understanding how and why people behave is an extremely interesting topic. I would love to study psychology in depth in the future, which is a new realisation. Though psychology won’t be my main focus, I would say that in the future, whatever technology I work on, will absolutely be related to that perspective: the psychological impacts of technology on people. It's just fascinating to see how we can work these systems that are proven to work, while also maintaining their benefits and minimising the downside.
What channge in the world would you like to see in the future?
So this might be a kind of weird answer because, you know, usually if someone was to ask, “what do you want to change about the world?” I'd say something like, “well, solve world hunger” or “world peace”, things like that. But for a non-traditional answer, I would say seeing universal respect for science. I would like for every person to be able to place full trust and confidence in scientists, especially after the pandemic.
If people placed full trust in scientists, especially politicians, we would not be in the situation we are in today. Climate scientists have been warning us about climate change for years and years. Physicists have a lot of insight that could be shared. Chemists are essentially the basis for how we structure everything. It would be really wonderful to see science as a field equally respected by people of all backgrounds. And I feel like it would make things easier for people in general because science has a lot of solutions for everything.
They may sometimes be hard solutions to implement, but if we can agree that they are in fact solutions… that’d be an improvement. That's half of the battle now, we can't even agree that these are solutions. Something as basic as a vaccine. Something that will help prevent a virus from spreading, even that isn't widely agreed upon and it is shocking to see because that is a fact. Plain and simple. Something like the fact that climate change exists - people still deny that happening even as they have evidence of it destroying their homes.
So yeah, science being equally respected everywhere and for the world to see feels pretty important.
