This was my master's project at Northwestern University, where I was part of VAK Lab, led by Professor Nivedita Arora. I designed a course on sustainability in computing and electronics. I wanted to make a workshop that would teach college undergraduates about how sustainability fits in our technology. I chose to focus on the key issues of sustainability and what we, as engineers, can do to make technology more sustainable.
Initially, I wanted to make a sustainability hackathon, where we could provide students with discarded electronics and have them design something new using old parts. However, there were many problems that arose with this idea - there was too much to do in too short of a time for students, there were many prerequisites to fill, and inter-electronic compatability was difficult to handle. So this idea got scrapped pretty quick.
The second idea was less of a workshop, but focused more on sustainability with electronics. I wanted to create a work of art using discarded PCBs to recycle a usually unrecyclable material. The idea was to use PCBs as capacitance touch sensors, as to where you could tap on the PCB and a light would turn on or a note would play. I was able to achieve proof of concept for this to work, but since we wanted to focus more on education, we pivoted this idea to a traditional workshop, although I may revisit this idea in the future.
All workshop materials are available on this Github repo: https://github.com/marker6275/Sustainable-Electronics-Workshop
Also in this repo is a full project report. Everything following this is a rough summary of the project.
This workshop was meant to be an 80-minute workshop, where we would cover the key concepts of sustainability in computing. The target audience of the workshop was college undergraduates, and while we focused on students studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering, this course would be accessible to all engineers, and potentially even non-engineers. The only real prerequities are a basic understanding of circuits so students could take this at all levels of study. We never quite nailed down the specific grade levels we wanted to target since there were arguments for all. I would have liked to target younger students, such as freshmen who had recently took introductory courses so this idea of sustainability in design would be introduced early on.
The workshop started with a quick lecture on the main ideas of sustainability and how they relate to electronics. It covers the carbon footprint, embodied and operational carbon, and how to calculate and discover these numbers. Then, we cover the concept of a life cycle assessment and how to use it to quantify how the environmental impact of a product. Then, we jump to an activity where students created circuits to consider the tradeoffs of different materials and how they affect the carbon footprint of a product. We wrapped up with examples as to how these tradeoffs are applied in industry.
The activity, which was the main highlight of the workshop, was a circuit design activity. We provided students with cardstock, carbon paint, copper tape, and a battery. Students were tasked with creating a circuit that would turn on a light using the provided materials, but focusing on producting the least amount of carbon. We had a worksheet that guided students through the process of designing the circuit and calculating the carbon footprint of the circuit.
We weren't able to formally run the workshop, but we did get to do a pilot with a few students. The feedback was positive, and everything seemed to make sense and run smoothly. Students were able to understand the concepts and apply them to the activity. Students were also able to create circuits according to the instructions and understand the tradeoffs of different materials. I would love to run the workshop for real some day. I think this would be a great way to introduce sustainability to engineering students, so I would love to see this truly taught in a college setting.