Abstract:

Background:
Given the rapid growth of electronic waste production and increasing energy demands of computation, cultivating socially and environmentally conscious computer scientists is a crucial step towards attaining sustainable development goals. Despite this, e-waste and sustainable computing are severely underrepresented in post-secondary computer science (CS) curricula, and there is a lack of guidance on how to integrate such topics into computing education.

Objectives:
To aid the development of CS sustainability curricula, this paper contributes data and insights from an exploratory survey of CS students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the relationship between CS and sustainability. By exploring how students view e-waste and analyzing and categorizing the general themes of their thoughts, future integrations of ethics in computer science courses will be able to better understand student attitudes to allow the ethics components to be better tailored to achieve syllabus goals.

Methods:
We analyze survey responses from 208 computer science students at a large Canadian public research university. These students enrolled in a second-year course on computer architecture. The survey consists of several Likert-scale and two short-answer questions that together assess students’ confidence in their knowledge of e-waste and sustainability, perceptions of the computer scientist’s role in addressing these issues, and attitudes towards the integration of sustainability into the curriculum. For open-response questions, we develop a set of themes that represent a majority of the responses before independently coding the responses. The two questions ask students to describe the role computer scientists should play in addressing e-waste and sustainability, as well as the ethical or social issues related to e-waste they would expect to be discussed in the course, respectively. In addition, many students mention obstacles that hinder their ability to address sustainability issues and other entities that should be responsible for these issues; we code responses along these axes as well.

Findings:
When asked about the role of computer scientists in addressing e-waste and sustainability, ideas of being aware/mindful, writing energy-efficient software, and designing sustainable hardware were commonly suggested. We also found that 67.8% of students agree that understanding e-waste is important for computer science students. Similarly, 72.1% of students agree that computing professionals have a responsibility to consider sustainability in their work. The survey also revealed that most students (34.1%) are only somewhat confident in describing the environmental effects of e-waste. Despite a majority of students believing that computing professionals have a responsibility to consider sustainability, a gap exists between this sentiment and actual interest, with 49% of students expressing some interest in learning more about sustainable or ethical computing practices.

Implications:
These findings suggest that computing education should move beyond awareness-based discussions to include practical, ethics-oriented activities and assignments that help students translate awareness into tangible, responsible action towards e-waste management in courses such as computer organization.

Keywords:

Electronic waste, post-secondary education, environmental awareness, sustainability, computing education.