This Conceptual Development and Planning project integrates sustainability concepts throughout undergraduate computing education. An interdisciplinary team of faculty from engineering, computer science, and cognitive science plans to test, develop, implement, and evaluate an educational model for sustainability integration into the curriculum. The team plans to develop models, projects and courses for beginning and upper level students, including a new course in green computing. The group envisions a focus on the power consumption of large data centers aspects of sustainability. The goal is to prepare students with the computing competencies, multi-disciplinary knowledge, and computational thinking methodologies to create a sustainable future.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the importance and currency of the topic and clear need for such changes in computing education to prepare the upcoming generation of computing professionals. The cross-disciplinary project team includes researchers with significant expertise in both the computing discipline research that underlies the implementation and in educational innovation. The project has the potential for providing new research models in an emerging field critical for future generations as well as the current one.
The broader impacts of the project lie in the potential to address changing demands on computing professionals and to attract a diverse audience of students. The project has the potential to provide innovative models for transforming computing education that are of value to other colleges and universities across the nation.
Green innovation and sustainability have received an increasing amount of interest and attention from the global community in the past few years. "To me, going green is the great challenge - and opportunity - of the 21st century", said by columnist and bestselling author, Thomas L. Friedman. President Obama’s economic stimulus plan also has a strong green hue. The plan would put half a million Americans to work on energy projects and push America toward a green and sustainable future. The goal of this project is to study, implement, and evaluate educational models to integrate sustainability and green computing into undergraduate computing curricula. Such integration will attract more students to be interested in green computing, and prepare students with green technology and computational thinking skills. The project outcomes include: newly designed green computing course materials; green computing learning modules that can be used in other computing courses; green computing student projects; outreach activities to K-12 teachers and students on green computing study The outcome of the proposed project will bridge the gap between computing and sustainability. With effective sustainability integration, the computing graduates will be motivated to improve the world around them, and enter their careers with better preparation of social and environmental responsibility. The project will also advance our understanding of the role of sustainability in computing education.
