Teaching Sustainable Computing Through Repair: Case Studies on Curriculum Design

Addressing the global e-waste crisis and reducing the carbon produced during operation, and equally, manufacturing, of consumer and datacenter electronics necessitates not only incremental technical improvements, but more broadly, a paradigm shift towards slower and more sustainable computing practices. To contend with these issues, both computer engineers and the general public need a better understanding of how their personal use of computers and their work relate to their social and environmental contexts. We argue that teaching electronic and computer repair is a great place to begin these conversations, by giving students the opportunity to develop practical hands-on skills through experiential, situative learning, and then linking these concrete experiences to more abstract discussions of sustainable computing. We have developed and run a year long course for university students, and workshops aimed at K12 students, both of which center around teaching sustainable computing and hands-on skills through electronic and computer repair. We designed and evaluated this course material based on surveys and interviews with students, repair experts, and community members. In this poster, we present our curricula and course materials and explain the pedagogical theory and research that underpin our approach, as well as how we adapted our work for different student groups and course formats. We enumerate challenges that we encountered while implementing these lessons, and provide recommendations for other educators interested in teaching repair courses or workshops.