Sustainability in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Journal article, 2024

Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries are responsible for overshooting several planetary boundaries, with poorer communities contributing the least to the problems but being impacted the most. At the same time, technical and economic gains fail to provide society at large with equal opportunities and improved quality of life. This article describes approaches taken in computing education to address the issue of sustainability. It presents results of a systematic review of the literature on sustainability in computing education. From a set of 572 publications extracted from six large digital libraries plus snowballing, we distilled and analyzed 89 relevant primary studies. Using an inductive and deductive thematic analysis, we study (i) conceptions of sustainability, computing, and education; (ii) implementations of sustainability in computing education; and (iii) research on sustainability in computing education. We present a framework capturing learning objectives and outcomes as well as pedagogical methods for sustainability in computing education. These results can be mapped to existing standards and curricula in future work. We find that only a few of the articles engage with the challenges as calling for drastic systemic change, along with radically new understandings of computing and education. We suggest that future work should connect to the substantial body of critical theory, such as feminist theories of science and technology. Existing research on sustainability in computing education may be considered rather immature, as the majority of articles are experience reports with limited empirical research.

higher education

Sustainability

engineering education

equality

computing education

Author

Anne-Kathrin Peters

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Rafael Capilla

Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT)

Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC)

Vlad Constantin Coroama

Technische Universität Berlin

Roegen Ctr Sustainabil

Rogardt Heldal

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

Patricia Lago

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Ola Leifler

Linköping University

Ana Moreira

Nova University of Lisbon

Joao Paulo Fernandes

University of Porto

Birgit Penzenstadler

Software Engineering 1

Jari Porras

University of Huddersfield

Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT)

Aalto University

Colin C. Venters

University of Huddersfield

CERN

ACM Transactions on Computing Education

1946-6226 (eISSN)

Vol. 24 1 13

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1145/3639060

More information

Latest update

7/3/2024 9