Transcending Boundaries: The Fusion of Sustainability Education and Software Engineering Education in a Master’s Course

Abstract

Humanity’s impact, manifested by climate change, shrinking habitats, and depleting natural resources, threatens all life on earth. Indeed, 2023 has proven to be the hottest year on earth in at least a century and a half. The key to maintaining a habitable planet is the broad use of sustainable practices. As pointed out in a 2019 ITiCSE (Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education) working group report, considering the ubiquity of software which is both a consumer of energy and an enabler of more energy efficient solutions in a vast range of applications, awareness and use of sustainable practices should be considered essential in the development of software. Yet computer science and software engineering education continue to neglect sustainability. Embedding sustainability into the curriculum is essential to ensure that software engineers prioritize the planet in their work. This practice report describes an approach used in a graduate level course titled “Software and Application Innovation” taught at LUT University (Finland), to enhance software engineering students’ sustainability competencies. Students were required to design and prototype new software solutions that addressed various sustainability challenges. Through this project, they developed a deeper understanding of global sustainability issues while still meeting the software engineering objectives for the course. Students learned to assess the sustainability impacts of their solutions from different dimensions/perspectives and keep competing demands in balance when designing their software projects. Based on our experiences, we present a practice report that can be used as a starting point when introducing and developing ‘sustainability competency’ in other software engineering or computer science courses. Key lessons learned are also shared.