An engineering curriculum track for IT for sustainability

Abstract

Information technology (IT) forms a crucial foundation for designing, building and managing future sustainable cities. This paper proposes a model to innovate the engineering and computing curriculum to include sustainability and IT topics in order to develop the skills and competencies that future professionals will need to design, build and manage future cities. Rather than developing a new program, we propose a curriculum model - called SustainIT -adapted from the successful 2006 US NAE Gordon Prize engineering curriculum innovation, The Learning Factory - as a possible roadmap to reform and complement existing Bachelors of Science (BS) degrees in engineering. By providing a series of guided electives, any engineering program may offer engineering, and/or computer science students the opportunity to learn about and become specialized in IT for Sustainability. Multidisciplinary topics include traditional ecological engineering; life-cycle design; design and application of resource microgrids; pervasive sensing and data aggregation; knowledge discovery, data mining and visualization; and, policy based control and operation for resource provisioning.