Abstract
During my experience at college, I found it increasingly difficult to coordinate school classes and meeting times with my friends and colleagues. With the growth and increased global usage of the internet, I noticed my friends and colleagues preferring to engage digitally instead of physically. This led me to investigate ways to help me and my friends coordinate our school classes or other educational or recreational activities, while I noticed a greater threat to all young adults and adolescents with the addiction to excessive internet usage. I determined the best course of action was to build a platform to encourage physical engagement and investigate ways to stop problematic internet usage.
My technical project focused on creating a way for users to create a schedule and tasks for themselves, but also to form groups with others to visually coordinate meeting times or see what they are up to. I called the platform Schedule Stacker, which would be a website to help everyone visually see conflicts or shared occurrences in their schedules with a three-dimensional stacking schedule. The significance of the project is my personal growth as a software developer and to potentially help other’s organization. Schedule Stacker will be the largest code base I have worked on individually, consisting of a cloud database, backend server, and an interactive client website. Additionally, I hope to help users become more organized, but also allow them to coordinate with their friends to promote physical activity.
While my technical project focused on creating a solution, I needed to investigate why excessive internet usage was such a problem for younger generations and the effectiveness of current and proposed solutions. Thus, in my STS research, I investigated to effects of problematic internet usage and their impact on mental health and current and proposed solutions to combat internet addiction by parents, governments, and other organizations. I proposed the perpetual nature of problematic internet usage and mental health issues as they can correlate to cause each other, and solutions should focus on breaking the cycle. The results should help the producers of these solutions (parents, governments, social media companies) look at the social impact of their solutions on young social groups, but also consider the faults of previous solutions as investigated in my research.
Looking back at the technical project and the STS research I conducted, I gained great technical insight into how a software product pipeline should look, but also considering what the user base should consist of and how to put the needs of the public first. Knowing who is going to be impacted by the solution should be the engineers’ priority to consider the responsibility to protect the public good. Surveys to determine the problem and testing are all concepts vital to software development, but also need to be emphasised for engineers to ethically conduct before releasing a potentially harmful solution. STS opened my eyes to the impact engineers can have on society, and moving forward, the perspective of social responsibility to help groups in need over extraneous factors needs to be remembered.
