A Sustainability Component for a First-Year Course for Information Technology Students

The concept of green computing has become a popular label employed by all major IT corporations when promoting either their hardware as energy efficient or asserting that their software solutions improve work performance and reduce the carbon footprint. Yet, how one addresses sustainability in computing is still a developing area and without clear guidelines or standards. Preparing students on topics of computing sustainability is thus essential for ensuring the future professionals have the skills to tackle such an important challenge. In this paper we propose a sustainability module we developed for an introductory computing course. We start by providing a justification of our work, motivated by the students´ attitudes towards green IT as emphasized by an initial study. We continue with a description of the module and the class it was prepared for. Finally, we analyze the impact the module had on the students by discussing the results of an assessment survey. Our work provides a stepping stone for innovative integration of sustainability in computing by motivating students to become responsible global citizen and professionals.