Digital products and services have a growing impact on our society and environment. Our computer science students will develop these products after graduation and therefore have a responsibility to consider sustainability in software development. Since this topic is rarely covered in computer science education, our students have a hard time understanding, let alone improving, the impact of their work on sustainability.
Therefore, we wanted to create teaching material for our Bachelor students and promote this material to all computer science students in their first year of their studies. We applied for a teaching grant of the ZHAW Sustainable Impact Program, which we received in spring 2024. In the following months, we started to create teaching material and organized it in a structured Moodle course. We also added pointers from the first-year teaching material (courses: Introduction to Programming and Software Projects) to link specific topics from software engineering (such as class design and refactoring) to the respective topics in sustainability (in this case, maintainability and mental load of the software developers). The Moodle course provides our students with concrete tools and methods that are necessary for the creation of sustainable software.
After the first week of the semester, already 25% of our first-year students have registered for this optional Moodle course on sustainable software engineering. Once the semester reaches calmer waters, we will intensify advertising this special course and hope to see many more students register and use the teaching materials.
Link to the Moodle course (ZHAW internal)