Why sustainability in computing?

Sustainability is a hot topic today, and will continue to be an important issue for the next few decades. Many professional groups including the Royal Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Engineering have already addressed sustainability through their professional guidelines and codes.

Unfortunately, despite the clear calls, today's computing education acts slow to such a shift towards sustainability education. In Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) computing curricula, there is no mention of sustainability or similiar terms. Researchers have identified barriers and challenges in sustainability development in computing education. Some of the barriers include: a fundamental lack of interest; a lack of staff training; a lack of tradition; and a lack of priority. 

We argue that sustainability study in computing is not only important and beneficial for the long term, but also has the potential to revitalize and transform the undergraduate computing education.

Hypothesis 1: sustainability study will help change the stereotype of computing and attract more people to the field. Research indicates that the computing discipline does have an image problem. Many people would view computer professionals as anti-social ''nerds'' sitting in front of computers day and night. Sustainability study will help students to realize their social and environmental responsibility. Sustainability inspired projects and outreach activities will motivate students to serve the community and improve the world around them. Being rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment and making differences, more students, including women and minorities will be attracted to the computing majors, and the retention rate of computing students will also be improved.

Hypothesis 2: sustainability study will help improve the quality of computing education through curriculum innovation, pedagogy experimentation, and collaborative assessment. New computing curricula should be organized around the theme of innovation to address our social responsiblilty and technology changes. Computing courses with sustainability integration will help students recognize many opportunities and challenges in the field. To solve real-world problems raised by the sustainability study, students' computational thinking skills will be trained through discovery based learning & collaborative learning. Since sustainability is relatively new in the computing field, we will collaborate with experienced researchers from education and other engineering disciplines to analyze and evaluate the project outcomes, and identify the best strategy for sustainability integration.

Hypothesis 3: sustainability study will strengthen inter-disciplinary connections, encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations, and promote industry and community involvement. The concept of sustainability is multi-disciplinary in nature, involving environmental engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, biology, business and many other disciplines. Faculty and students in computing will be exposed to a wide range of disciplines through intellectual sharing, team-work, and computing services. Many Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, Google and Apple, announced their environmental strategies to make their products green for the long term. Sustainability study will help to get them involved in computing education innovation.

Thus, this National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Conceptual Development and Planning (CDP) project will initiate sustainability study in undergraduate computing education at Michigan Technological University (MTU). We will conduct conceptual design, planning, implementation, evaluation, assessment, and continuing improvement in this project to test our ideas and hypotheses. Figure 1 illustrates the project pathway.

Figure 1: Pathway to revitalize undergraduate computing education through sustainability study.