Integrating Sustainability into Undergraduate Software Engineering Education: An Experience Report

Sustainability is gaining increasing importance in software engineering education, as future software engineers must understand the environmental and societal effects of the systems they create. To prepare students for these challenges, it is essential to integrate sustainability into practical courses where its principles and real-world implications are emphasized. However, there are still limited examples of how sustainability can be effectively embedded into existing university curricula, highlighting a significant gap in educational practice. In this paper, we describe an experience report of a practical and agile-oriented undergraduate software engineering course that integrates sustainability. We found that the students were successful in identifying various effects of a software system on different sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, sustainability aspects can be seamlessly integrated into existing courses with minimal effort. Therefore, we share our learning materials with the hope that they will inspire and be reused by other software engineering educators.