This work is part of an ongoing Sports, Technology, and Learning class where computer science students and student-athletes learn different aspects of technological development, ideation, design, and prototyping in the context of sports technologies. Alongside developing these technical skills, this class also takes advantage of a variety of media related to sports, to examine and discuss utilizing such media as a contextualizing factor in deciding what to build and why. Media depictions of sports and the role of technology in the creation of narratives and innovation is an often under examined way of furthering understandings about the social construction of numerous phenomena like race, gender, and ability. In this poster, we present and discuss a pilot assignment using Critical Media Literacy (CML) tenets as an explicit tool for engaging with media discussions in class, and how it can impact learners’ understandings and practices around technology ideation, design, and critique. As the students engage with the media collected for the course, such as films & television, conference & journal articles, and sports journalism, they engage people outside of the class with course content and document the engagements in an assortment of formats (e.g., writing, podcasting, videos, drawings, etc.). The discussions continue throughout the quarter, aiming to develop the student’s awareness of a context at the intersection of sports and technology that will inform their final design projects.