Infusing sustainability into software engineering education: Lessons learned from capstone projects

Abstract

Sustainable development (SD) has become a millennium challenge for humanity. It has boosted the integration of sustainable, sound practices across different fields (e.g. e-participation, smart transportation, sustainable agriculture). Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have strongly supported social transitions in becoming more sustainable and participative over the last two decades. Integrating multi-disciplinary sustainability concepts into the higher education of computer scientists is important in that this ensures that future ICT endeavours will take sustainability concerns into account. This article describes four capstone projects developed by students from the Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Pervasive Computing and Communications for Sustainable Development (PERCCOM), who were enrolled alongside regular students in a traditional software engineering course held at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. The coursework was part of a research project called Green.Citizen@ICT, which aims at investigating the use of ICT and software services for infusing sustainable habits in citizens through the development of applications for SD. This study demonstrates how a sustainable development focus can be integrated into a traditional software engineering course. The goal of this article is to enhance understanding of the integration of sustainability into software engineering education, by providing a detailed example of a master course in which this took place. This course supported the development of ICT competences for building cleaner, greener, and more resource- and energy-efficient cyber-physical systems, while addressing the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.