Sarah Coyne

JACKSON TWP — A classroom of Seneca Valley High School students had to survive without technology and social media for 24 hours, and they all lived to tell the tale.

They participated in a challenge to give up all technology for 24 hours, and one student won an award for writing about her experience.

Sarah Coyne, a junior, wrote an essay that received a Special Merit Award from Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, the organization that sponsored the contest.

Dana Hadley, the Seneca Valley teacher who got her students involved in the contest, said that it was a “tough challenge” for then to give up the technology, given that it is so ingrained in their daily lives.

“These kids can’t imagine life without it,” she said. “At least the competition got them thinking about how to live life without carrying little computers along with them all the time.”

Coyne said that going without technology for a day wasn’t “too hard” because “I was able to go outside and do other things.”

“But I will admit it was odd not being able to just reach in my pocket and grab my phone,” she said.

However, the bigger lesson learned during the experiment didn’t occur to Coyne until she wrote her essay.

“I came to note a lot of the patterns our generation unintentionally follows resulting in a lack of personal communication skills,” she said. “It is hard to imagine a time when technology wasn’t so integrated in our lives.”

With that said, Coyne has an added respect for technology and “how much simpler it makes day-to-day activities.”

Student Erika Brunner said being without technology for a day was harder than expected.

“I did find myself getting bored more easily since I was so used to going on some type of technology to entertain myself,” she said. “As an alternative, I read a lot and studied notes for school.”

Like Coyne, she said that overusing technology can lead to unintended consequences such as a decrease in personal communication.

“I wanted to prove that as this generation gets so involved with technology, we lose a connection with our family and friends,” she said. “Some teenagers and even adults cannot have a face-to-face conversation with someone without feeling awkward.”

Brunner added she feels people “lose their social skills with being so involved in technology.”

Hadley, who teaches field biology and horticulture, said nobody had cell phones when she was in high school.

As a 39-year-old, she remembers big, boxlike cell phones that weren’t much more than portable landline phones.

Now, everything has changed, and she tried to make her students realize that.

“I tell them all the time, ‘When I was your age, nobody had a cell phone. None of this existed,’” she said.

To that point, Brunner said it’s hard for her to think of a time when cell phones, computers and tablets weren’t so prevalent.

“It’s hard to imagine a time when technology wasn’t the main focus in our culture,” she said. “Growing up around technology always being there, we do not know a time when our society did not have technology.”

More than 400 students from Western Pennsylvania participated in the contest and wrote essays about their experiences.