Let's FOCUS: Location-based intervention tool to mitigate phone use in college classrooms

Abstract

Many studies have shown that smartphone activities, such as Facebook, text messaging, during the class are irrelevant to learning, and lead to a negative influence on students' academic performance and the flow of the class. In this paper, we present Let's FOCUS, an application that helps college students concentrate on the class. For each class, Let's FOCUS offers context-aware reminders and a virtual limiting space in which students limit their smartphone use. We conducted a campus-wide campaign for six weeks to evaluate the usefulness of Let's FOCUS. A total of 379 students were engaged in 9,335 hours of limiting behaviors over the campaign period. We found that many students continued to use Let's FOCUS after the campaign without any external rewards.