[mathking]

Our students are supposed to be working when they have work to do. So if they are distracted (whether they are on a cell phone or some other form of distraction) someone will talk to them. Often it just takes one comment from a student team leader. Sometimes one of the mentors. That said, we rarely have a build session in which there is no down time for anyone. It is often the case that two groups are working on parts of a larger system, and one group finishes first. If a student is checking email, replying to a text, posting to Instagram or looking at Facebook while they wait for something else to be completed I treat them the same way I would want my employer to treat me if I were posting to ChiefDelphi while I am in a planning period avoiding a mountain of grading.

I am from a generation well before cell phones. So I have had something of an aversion to their ubiquity (not that everyone has them but that so many people use them all the time). But I am also a trained statistician who has about 45 semester hours of history classes. So I know that every generation sees the apocalypse and the end of civilization as we know it in things the current generation does. (Witness the vast legions of teachers and others who insist that students have lost the ability to write because of social media, texting and the internet. In spite of the evidence that students today are better writers on the average than students 20, 30 or 40 years ago.) There have been many times when a cell phone picture or the timely finding of a YouTube video or set of instructions on a cell phone has jumped our robot building forward. So I try to focus on behaviors that aren't good, like not paying attention while in the shop, rather than a blanket assumption that a student on a cell phone at a meeting is a bad thing.