Programming 1 and sustainability

Abstract

Computer programming is an essential skill for today's engineers, and sustainability plays a role of growing interest in any of the design phases of an engineering project. The fundamentals of sustainability, with basic concepts such as "carbon intensity", must be covered in any engineering curriculum. We propose a basic computer programming course in which the lab sessions incorporate exercises related to the computation of environmental impacts. For instance, an exercise might request the computation of the carbon footprint of the lab sessions during a whole year. Lab sessions use an automatic evaluation server, so called Jutge.org that assesses about the correctness of the programs submitted by the students. New exercises concerning sustainability topics are included in the Jutge.org course. The course involves the effort of a multidisciplinary team. First, lecturers on basic programming are required. An expert on automatic evaluation of computer programs is essential to prepare the statements and the test sets of the proposed exercises. Finally, the advice of economists and sustainability experts is crucial to guarantee judicious conclusions are drawn from each exercise. Forming a team with this profile is a challenging task. Our Computer Science (CS) department lectures basic programming courses to more than 1700 students/year. The success of this approach could bring a substantial social impact in our ecosystem.