Sustainable Development Goals in Computer Engineering:

A Curriculum Integration

Urtzi Markiegi

1 a

and I

nigo Aldalur

2,1 b

Electronics and Computing Department, Mondragon Unibertsitatea, Arrasate-Mondragon, Spain

Computer Languages and Systems Department, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), San Sebastian, Spain

Keywords:

Computer Engineering, Sustainable Development Goals, Problem Based Learning.

Abstract:

This contribution delves into the incorporation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the Computer

Engineering curriculum. The study addresses challenges associated with integrating SDGs as cross-cutting

content in higher education. Employing a Problem-Based Learning approach, semester projects are aligned

with SDGs, and their impact is systematically assessed. Key research questions guide the study, evaluating

students’ knowledge, perceptions, and the alignment of projects with SDGs.

The methodology integrates SDG-focused learning units within the existing Problem-Based Learning struc-

ture. New activities, including initial training, initial assessment, impact assessment, and SDG learning as-

sessment, guide and evaluate students’ integration of SDGs. Results demonstrate successful implementation

across three years of the Computer Engineering degree. The study involves a signiﬁcant number of subjects,

students, and teams, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation. A rubric assesses SDG impact, emphasizing justi-

ﬁcation and direct positive contributions to SDG objectives.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17

globally agreed goals adopted by the United Nations

General Assembly in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda

for Sustainable Development

. The SDGs represent

a global consensus on the priorities for sustainable

development. They were developed through exten-

sive consultations and negotiations, reﬂecting the col-

lective aspirations and commitments of UN member

states (H

ak et al., 2016).

The goals comprehensively address the three

spheres of sustainable development: environmental,

social and economic. They also cover critical areas

such as poverty, inequality, social inclusion, sustain-

able energy, climate change, quality education and

technological innovation. To address the 17 goals,

169 speciﬁc targets and 232 indicators were speciﬁed

for evaluation

. This comprehensive framework helps

align policies and actions across different sectors and

regions (H

ak et al., 2016).

The university has developed different initiatives

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0897-6190

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4840-8884

https://sdgs.un.org/es/goals

at institutional level to make its contribution to the

development of the SDGs

. However, the involve-

ment at the curriculum level was carried out at the

beginning of the 2021-2022 academic year, when the

Royal Decree 822/2021 was published, which estab-

lishes the organization of university education and the

procedure for assuring its quality

. A relevant feature

of this decree is the inclusion of the Sustainable De-

velopment Goals among the guiding principles for the

design of curricula in ofﬁcial higher education. This

means that higher education institutions must incor-

porate a sustainable and responsible approach in their

curricula, enabling students to understand and address

global sustainable development challenges. Accord-

ing to Royal Decree 822/2021, the SDGs must be in-

corporated into curricula as cross-cutting content or

competencies

. The way in which these values and

objectives will be incorporated will be decided by the

center or university, always taking into account their

academic nature and the objectives of each degree.

The incorporation of the SDGs in the curricula is

a new challenge for higher education. In this context,

this paper presents the methodology followed to inte-

https://www.university.edu/sdg-policy

https://www.boe.es/eli/es/rd/2021/09/28/822

Markiegi, U. and Aldalur, I.

Sustainable Development Goals in Computer Engineering: A Curriculum Integration.

DOI: 10.5220/0013258300003932

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2025) - Volume 1, pages 315-322

ISBN: 978-989-758-746-7; ISSN: 2184-5026

315

grate the learning of the SDGs in the Computer Engi-

neering curriculum, placing the focus on raising stu-

dents’ awareness of the development goals. To guide

the work and to perform the measurement of the ex-

perience, the following research questions have been

answered:

• RQ1: What is the students’ level of knowledge

about the SDGs before and after the experience?

• RQ2: Do students think it is important to analyze

the impact of their projects on the SDGs?

• RQ3: Was it easy for students to align the SDGs

with their projects?

• RQ4: What have been the academic results ob-

tained from the evaluation of the SDGs?

• RQ5: Which SDGs have students worked on the

most?

The rest of the article ﬁrst presents a review of the

most relevant related works. Next, the case study pre-

sented is introduced, detailing the characteristics of

the faculty and the adaptations made to the project-

based work methodology to incorporate the SDGs.

Next, the results of applying the methodology are pre-

sented and analyzed. Finally, conclusions and pend-

ing challenges are presented.

2 RELATED WORK

In recent years, universities have been incorporat-

ing the SDGs into their courses. There are different

examples that show how they have integrated them.

For example, the University of the Basque Country

(UPV/EHU) and the University of La Rioja (UR) have

carried out a joint experience introducing the SDGs

in the Project Management subject of the Computer

Engineering degree, involving so far more than 300

students (Blanco et al., 2024). During the course,

students have had to carry out 3 different 3-week

projects. The ﬁrst consisted of producing a video re-

lated to the SDGs and uploading it to an online plat-

form. In the second project, students had to produce

a video channel aimed at raising awareness of the

SDGs. Finally, the students had to implement an ac-

cessible website aimed at motivating people to take

action on the SDGs. Oliva-Maza et al. (Oliva-Maza

et al., 2019) proposed to the students a real-world

problem to address and promote engineering voca-

tions through the Internet of Things (IoT) and SDGs.

This project already implied certain SDGs and the

students had to learn their meaning and the project’s

implication on them. On the other hand, Brunell and

Leslie (Brunell, 2019), implemented a study whose

idea was to demonstrate how the use of SDGs would

increase sustainability awareness in civil engineering

students. To that end, students were asked to select a

number of SDGs to work with in their Final Degree

Project. A group of professional mentors advised the

students in this process. The ﬁnal results showed that

working closely with professional mentors required

students to communicate effectively and become so-

cially aware of the global impact of their designs.

Among the different ways of integrating the SDGs

in the university, other authors have also opted for

introducing them through PBL. Perez-Sanchez et al.

erez-S

anchez et al., 2020), have introduced PBL

methodology in 6 degrees for the last courses (3rd

and 4th year) involving 64 different subjects and

more than 60 teachers. Before starting, they de-

ﬁned that PBL allowed students’ independence in the

decision-making process on what actions were taken

to improve the SDGs and allowed them to explicitly

present to others and promote awareness of the SDGs.

The PBA models were very different in nature, but al-

most all of them dealt directly or partially with some

aspects related to the SDGs. The difference with our

proposal is that the students did not reﬂect on the im-

pact of their projects on the SDGs, but the SDGs were

given to them. Marco Braga et al. (Braga et al., 2022)

developed a short-term project experience (PBL) with

a focus on SDGs in cities at the Federal Center for En-

gineering Education in Rio, Brazil. For 48 hours, stu-

dents were confronted with SDG problems in urban

communities and challenged to create low-cost solu-

tions. At the end, they had to present an argument

for experts from NGOs, governments and corpora-

tions. This case shares with our work that students

must reﬂect on the impact of projects on the SDGs,

and differs in that their project is shorter in time than

the one presented in this paper. Pucha and Dumbar

(Pucha and Dunbar, 2022) conducted a PBL expe-

rience with ﬁrst-year engineering students. In their

work, they sought through SDG-focused projects to

have students explore connections between sociocul-

tural resources and engineering design practices. The

continuous assessment plan considered three factors

measured through a survey: (i) the level of students’

knowledge of aspects and perceptions of the SDGs,

(ii) the level of post-activity reﬂection, and (iii) the

level of quality of work products for both individual

and team projects. Unlike our work, students are not

required to reﬂect on the impact of their projects on

the SDGs. Podg

orska and Zdonek (Podg

orska and

Zdonek, 2024) investigated how PBL innovations at a

Polish university contribute to achieving SDGs. The

authors conducted a qualitative and quantitative anal-

ysis of 108 projects from 2018 to 2021, involving 324

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316

Figure 1: New activities for the development of SDG learning incorporated in the ABP methodology.

researchers, 607 students, and 233 business experts.

They detect that interdisciplinarity between research

areas was common, highlighting the role of PBL in

promoting SDGs at universities.

3 CASE STUDY

This paper presents the methodology used to inte-

grate the systematic study of the SDGs in the semester

projects of the Computer Engineering degree.

In the ﬁrst three years of the degree, each semester

is divided into two phases: (i) the teaching period and

(ii) the semester project. During the teaching period,

all the training and evaluation activities of the sub-

jects are carried out, including the exams correspond-

ing to this period. At the end of the academic pe-

riod, the semester project is carried out, which con-

sists of a group work that integrates all the subjects

of the semester (except electives). The duration of

the project is 4 weeks in the ﬁrst course, 6 weeks in

the second course and 8 weeks in the third course. It

should be noted that during the semester project, stu-

dents are exclusively dedicated to it.

The evaluation of the subjects is based on the

activities of both the class period and the semester

project. Taking into account that the weight of the

project varies according to the course, the weight in

the evaluation is proportional to the extension of the

project in the semester calendar. This means an im-

pact of 20% in the ﬁnal grade for the ﬁrst course,

while in the second and third courses it means 30%

and 40% respectively.

The project is developed following the principles

of the PBL (P

erez-S

anchez et al., 2020). Speciﬁcally,

the PBL methodology is adopted in which the project

is oriented to problem-solving (PBL). Guided by this

methodology, the student teams, composed of 4 to 6

members, undertake the project in 4 phases: (i) anal-

ysis and problem statement, (ii) identiﬁcation and se-

lection of solutions, (iii) development of the prototype

and (iv) analysis of the results and drawing of conclu-

sions. The professors of the semester’s subjects are

in charge of monitoring and tutoring the projects, and

weekly or biweekly meetings are held for their coor-

dination.

In the context of the project, in addition to the de-

velopment of technical competencies associated with

the subjects, cross-cutting competencies such as ef-

fective communication and teamwork for problem-

solving are also developed. The integration of the

study of the SDGs has been carried out within the

framework of the problem-solving teamwork compe-

tency. Speciﬁcally, a new learning unit has been in-

corporated from which students identify and evalu-

ate the impact that the developed project has on the

SDGs. This learning unit has been partially inspired

by the SUS Project-Based Learning methodology

To guide the implementation in the faculty and stu-

dent groups, new activities have been incorporated in

the project methodology, as presented in ﬁgure 1. In

the case of the teaching staff, the contents of the new

unit as well as the evaluation system have been pre-

sented in the coordination meetings of the different

semesters.

The ﬁrst activity incorporated initial training (ad-

ditional activity Nº1 in ﬁgure 1) is given with the start

of the semester project and consists of a basic train-

ing to introduce the history and evolution of the SDGs

as well as the proposed working methodology for the

study of the SDGs in the project (including the evalua-

tion rubric). During the training, resources and exam-

ples are provided to inspire the teams in the problem

analysis and approach phase. Once the ﬁrst phase of

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/

documents/260351525 06 Derek HESI Presentation.pdf

Sustainable Development Goals in Computer Engineering: A Curriculum Integration

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Table 1: Rubric for evaluating the impact of the project on the SDGs.

Deliverable Weight <5 5-6 7-8 9-10

Initial

evaluation

10%

The initial assessment of

the impact of the project on

the SDGs is not carried out.

A basic identiﬁcation of

the SDGs that the project

impacts is carried out.

An identiﬁcation and justiﬁcation

of the SDGs on which the

project impacts is carried out.

Assessment

of impact

90%

The project’s impact on

the SDGs is not measured

(or poorly measured)

A basic measurement

of the project’s impact

on the SDGs is made,

but a superﬁcial

justiﬁcation is made.

A measurement of the

project’s impact on the SDGs

is carried out, and a detailed

justiﬁcation is provided

using the targets.

A measurement of the

project’s impact on the SDGs

is carried out, and a detailed

justiﬁcation is provided

using the targets.

The project has a direct

positive impact on (at

least) two objectives.

Table 2: Number of students and project teams involved per

semester and course.

Year Semester

Number of Subjects Number of

Students

Number

of Teams

Mandatory Projects

1 5 2

2 5 4 10

1 5 5

2 5 5 6

1 5 5

2 5 5 8

the PBA methodology has been developed, the teams

have the problem identiﬁed, delimited and analyzed.

The validation of the selected problem is an activity

that has been carried out at the level of technical sub-

jects to ensure that the learning objectives of each sub-

ject can be developed in the context of the selected

problem.

The second added activity initial assessment (ad-

ditional activity Nº2 in ﬁgure 1) complements the val-

idation for the SDG scope and consists of an initial as-

sessment of the impact the teams estimate the project

will have on the goals. The outcome of this activity is

a deliverable that describes for each project the con-

text of the problem and its alignment with the SDGs.

This deliverable ensures that the problem selected by

the teams is aligned with the SDGs. Teachers re-

view the deliverables, evaluate them following the

rubric (described at the end of this section) and pro-

vide the corresponding feedback to the student teams.

Teachers provided targeted feedback to help students

improve their work. Lecturers recognised teams for

clearly deﬁning their project goals and aligning them

with relevant SDGs. However, they pointed out ar-

eas where the problem scope could be clariﬁed to en-

sure it was manageable within the project aim. Feed-

back objective was to highlight creative and innova-

tive ideas, encouraging students to explore these fur-

ther. At the same time, teachers suggested that some

solutions needed more thorough research to improve

feasibility and alignment with the objectives.

After completing the next three phases of the PBL

methodology to propose a solution, develop the pro-

totype and draw the conclusions, two new additional

activities are carried out in relation to the SDGs. In

the third embedded activity impact assessment (addi-

tional activity Nº3 in ﬁgure 1 each student team as-

sesses the impact the project has on the SDGs us-

ing the self-diagnostic tool SDG Impact Assessment

Tool

. This tool is developed by the Gothenburg Cen-

ter for Sustainable Development in collaboration with

Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg

University of Technology (Chalmers, 2019) and is

published under the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 license. The tool allows for a

simple and systematic recording of the analysis per-

formed to later generate a report and visual summary

of the impact. In this activity, students are asked to

include a summary of the impact in the conclusions

section of the project report, and to attach the report

generated with the tool as an annex.

Lastly, in the SDG learning assessment the teach-

ing team completes the assessment of the work based

on the rubric. The assessment of the SDG learning

unit consists of two deliverables: (i) initial assess-

ment and (ii) impact assessment, with the weight of

each deliverable being 10% and 90% of the unit grade

respectively. The three levels of the rubric for the ini-

tial assessment, the objective of which (described in

the ﬁrst phase of this section) is to ensure that student

teams select a project problem that is aligned with the

SDGs, are provided in the table 1. In the deliverable

section, the rubric provides a four-level scale that re-

wards work with the greatest impact on the SDGs and

the greatest rigor in justiﬁcation.

The methodology proposed in this work has been

implemented for the ﬁrst three years of the Computer

Engineering degree. The table 2 presents the data on

the number of subjects and students involved in this

study. The table details for each course and semester

the number of required subjects in the curriculum

https://sdgimpactassessmenttool.org/

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318

Table 3: Questionnaire results (Strongly disagree, SD; Disagree, D; Neither agree nor disagree, N; Agree, A; Strongly agree,

SA).

Questions Frequencies Descriptive statistics

SD D N A SA Median Mode

Q1: I was aware of the SDGs before the project. 26 6 22 30 25 A A

Q2: I know the SDG number. 10 13 21 36 29 A A

Q3: Could you brieﬂy explain what the SDGs consist of?. 5 6 28 48 22 A A

Q4: I ﬁnd it interesting to participate in this type of activities

(development of SDGs in general).

28 19 31 27 4 N N

Q5: I consider the introduction of this type of activities in PBL to

be positive.

30 16 31 23 9 N N

Q6: Engaging in the practice of the SDGs can promote a more

sustainable vision of knowledge application.

12 20 42 28 7 N N

Q7: Knowing the existing problems and the established objectives

helps me and raises awareness to propose solutions to solve them.

14 19 34 34 8 N N

Q8: I consider it more appropriate to work on the SDGs in the

project period than in the school period.

19 13 37 26 14 N N

Q9: Aligning the impact of the project with some of the objectives

has been easy for me.

18 19 31 32 9 N A

Q10: Aligning the impact of the project with the speciﬁc goals

directly in the objectives has been easy for me.

19 19 34 28 9 N N

(third column of the table) contrasted with the num-

ber of subjects involved in the semester project (fourth

column of the table). The last two columns detail the

number of students per course, as well as the number

of teams that carried out the semester project. Note

that in the ﬁrst course, not all subjects of the semester

participate in the semester project. In the 2nd and

3rd years, the number of subjects participating in the

project is 5, leaving out the elective subjects. In ad-

dition, it should be noted that there are students in

the ﬁrst course who for various reasons (they leave

their studies, or did not reach the required level during

the academic period) did not participate in the second

semester project. Finally, repeating students with 12

or fewer credits do not participate in the projects.

4 RESULTS

This section presents the results obtained during the

experience, in which a total of 149 students from the

ﬁrst 3 years of the Computer Engineering degree have

participated. The number of groups during the ﬁrst

semester was 27 and 24 in the second semester. It

should be noted that a total of 26 subjects (6 in the

ﬁrst course, 10 in the second and 10 in the third) and

34 teachers have been involved in this experience.

For the evaluation of this research work, we

present the data collected in 2 tables and 2 ﬁgures.

The table 3 summarizes the results of the question-

naire completed by 109 students, the 73.15% of the

total. The survey was accomplished in a Google

forms questionnaire, and it was provided to students

at the end of the course. Students did not know their

ﬁnal grades when the questionnaire was answered, in

order to avoid any bias. To develop the questionnaire,

we have relied on the works (Chofr

e et al., 2021;

Seva-Larrosa et al., 2023). The table 4 presents the

summary of the scores resulting from assessing the

SDG learning unit. Figure 2 present the summary

of the impact that the students’ projects have had on

the SDG. In order to compile the faculty’s assess-

ments and evaluations, a new section analyzing the

implementation of the SDGs has been added to the

semester-end report.

4.1 RQ1: What Is the Students’ Level of

Knowledge About the SDGs Before

and after the Experience?

The ﬁrst 3 questions in the table 3 answer the stu-

dents’ level of knowledge about the SDGs. The ﬁrst

question shows that a signiﬁcant number of students

were unaware of the SDGs. Despite this, the majority

of students were aware of them. After carrying out

the project, the vast majority of students know the ex-

act number of SDGs as well as being able to explain

what each of them consists of.

It can be concluded that although most of the stu-

dents knew about the SDGs before the project, after

the project was completed, more students know the

number of SDGs and are able to brieﬂy explain what

each of them consists of. Therefore, the inclusion

of the SDGs in the PBA has served to broaden their

knowledge of the SDGs.

Sustainable Development Goals in Computer Engineering: A Curriculum Integration

319

4.2 RQ2: Do Students Think It Is

Important to Analyze the Impact of

Their Projects on the SDGs?

Questions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Table 3 answer this re-

search question. For all of these questions, both the

mean and median are N, i.e., students neither agree

nor disagree.

For questions 4 and 5, the number of students who

strongly disagree is high. These students do not ﬁnd it

interesting or positive to carry out the analysis of the

impact of the SDGs on their projects. In general, for

these 2 questions, more people disagreed than agreed

with them, and they were the worst rated of the entire

questionnaire.

For questions 6, 7 and 8, the number of students

agreeing and disagreeing is practically the same. In

the case of questions 6 and 7, students believe that

the inclusion of the SDGs in their projects promotes

a more sustainable vision and helps them to become

aware of them when looking for solutions. These two

aspects are very important and one of the objectives

when including the analysis of the SDGs in the stu-

dents’ projects. Regarding question 8, the students

have homogeneously valued the fact of working with

the SDGs both in the teaching period and in the PBA

period.

4.3 RQ3: Was It Easy for Students to

Align the SDGs with Their Projects?

Questions 9 and 10 in Table 3 answer this research

question. In both questions, the number of students

who agree or strongly agree is the same as the number

of students who disagree or strongly disagree. This

tells us that it has been neither easy nor difﬁcult for

students to align the impact of their SDGs with their

projects.

4.4 RQ4: What Have Been the

Academic Results Obtained from

the Evaluation of the SDGs?

The table 4 shows the number of groups per course

and semester and the average grade obtained by each

of them. First, the 3rd and 5th columns show the

average ﬁnal grade for each of the groups in each

course and semester. The objective was that stu-

dents could adequately identify how their projects

have been aligned with at least one SDG goal. In

these results, we can see how the average grade ob-

tained in courses 1 and 3 has decreased in the second

semester compared to the ﬁrst. On the contrary, in the

second year, the average grade obtained in the second

semester was higher.

The results obtained by the third year students are

better than those obtained by the ﬁrst and second year

students. This is due to the fact that these students

are able to reﬂect better and analyze in a more mature

way how their projects are aligned with the SDGs.

Table 4: Results of the evaluation of the SDGs.

Semester 1 Semester 2

Academic

Year

#Teams Mark #Teams Mark

1 13 5,53 10 4,38

2 6 4,41 6 5,73

3 8 7,15 8 6,21

4.5 RQ5: Which SDGs Have Students

Worked on the Most?

The students have been asked to use the self-

diagnostic tool SDG Impact Assessment Tool to de-

tail the analysis of the project’s impact on the SDGs.

The tool allows identifying whether the project de-

veloped has a positive or negative impact on each of

the goals. It also speciﬁes whether the project’s im-

pact on each goal is direct or indirect. The data shows

that most of the impacts analyzed by the students are

indirect positive (62%), i.e., they improve the SDGs

indirectly with the contribution of their project. It

should be noted that the impact analysis carried out

by the students has focused (with few exceptions) on

the positive impact of the project on the SDGs.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of impacts that

the students’ projects have had on each of the SDGs.

Eighteen percent of the impacts of the works were

oriented to the improvement of sustainable cities and

communities. The high number of impacts is directly

related to the fact that the theme of the project in the

second semester of the ﬁrst year is aimed at devel-

oping an autonomous vehicle that the student teams

have oriented towards assisting people with reduced

mobility, delivering medicines or optimizing travel

routes. The second objective with the highest num-

ber of impacts (16%) was the SDG-4 (quality educa-

tion) for quality education. Teams of students from

all three courses have oriented their projects to games

focused on raising awareness of various SDGs. The

third objective with the highest number of impacts

(14%) is SDG-13 (climate action) for the adoption

of measures to combat climate change and its effects.

A signiﬁcant number of studies have opted for solu-

tions that indirectly have a positive impact on the ﬁght

against climate change by optimizing resources to re-

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320

Figure 2: Distribution of positive impacts of projects on the SDGs.

duce consumption and emissions. It is worth high-

lighting the impact (8%) on the SDG-10 (reduced in-

equality) to reduce inequalities with striking projects

such as a bidirectional sign language to words con-

verter or home automation platforms and systems to

support the elderly.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper presents the implementation carried out

to integrate the systematic study of the SDGs in the

semester projects of the Computer Engineering de-

gree as a new learning unit. To this end, 4 new activi-

ties have been incorporated in the methodology of the

semester project. In addition, the necessary materials

for the learning of the new unit have been developed,

as well as the evaluation rubric. The implementation

has been carried out and evaluated in the ﬁrst three

courses of the Computer Engineering degree. The

initiative has involved 149 students and 34 teachers.

Fifty-one projects have been carried out involving 26

subjects. The evaluation of this work has been guided

by ﬁve research questions and for its analysis data has

been collected from the learning unit grades, student

surveys, the study of the impact of the projects on the

SDGs and the faculty’s perception of the implemen-

tation.

The results obtained allow us to afﬁrm that all the

projects developed by the students have been aligned

with the SDGs. Most of the semester projects have

an open theme, and sometimes it is difﬁcult for the

student teams to deﬁne the problem. Narrowing the

problems to areas that allow developing solutions for

the SDGs has facilitated in some cases the project def-

inition phase.

The development of this learning unit has im-

proved the students’ knowledge of the SDGs. In ad-

dition, the student teams have conducted a system-

atic analysis of the impact of the project on the SDGs.

This knowledge has provided them with a new dimen-

sion to take into account when solving engineering

problems.

According to the results obtained, the students

consider that incorporating the analysis of the SDGs

in the semester project is more appropriate than doing

it in the teaching period and also promotes awareness.

However, they do not ﬁnd it attractive to carry out the

impact assessment, although it was easy for them to

do so. Our hypothesis is that students show little inter-

est in working on SDGs because they focus mostly on

technical knowledge. In addition, they may consider

that a small-scale project would not have a signiﬁcant

impact on such ambitious goals.

With respect to the subject matter of the projects,

the teachers have detected that in previous courses

most of the projects were related to leisure or sys-

tems automation, while now the students carry out ap-

proaches for the improvement of environmental, so-

cial and economic problems. This perception of the

faculty is corroborated by the results obtained when

analyzing the impact of the projects on the SDGs. It

can be concluded that, on the one hand, the leisure

theme has evolved into a new concept of gamiﬁcation

for awareness.

It has been detected that lecturers do not feel com-

fortable tutoring and evaluating the SDG section, so

training is needed to help them become familiar with

the SDGs and to motivate students to become aware

of them.

In the future, we want to modify the rubric pre-

sented in order to make a more appropriate assess-

ment of student effort and learning. The changes we

want to introduce are intended to solve three opportu-

nities for improvement that we have identiﬁed: (i) to

carry out a gradual work and evaluation of the SDGs

in the different courses, (ii) to modify the weights to

Sustainable Development Goals in Computer Engineering: A Curriculum Integration

321

concentrate the grade on the ﬁnal activity and (iii)

to avoid the over-alienation of objectives with the

project.

For the ﬁrst point, a tiered rubric has been de-

signed so that in each course, students will have to

acquire new knowledge regarding the SDGs and im-

prove impact assessment in their projects. The new

rubric will have 4 dimensions of assessment: method-

ology, SDG goals, SDG targets and justiﬁcation. With

the new rubric, ﬁrst year students will work on the

ﬁrst two dimensions of methodology and SDG tar-

gets, in the second year the dimension of ”SDG tar-

gets” will be added and in the third year it will be

completed with the dimension of justiﬁcation. We in-

tend to accompany the new rubric with revised student

SDG training, so that it puts the focus of the train-

ing on the dimensions of work that correspond to the

course.

In the second point, the design of the new rubric

proposes to modify the weights, speciﬁcally it is pro-

posed to eliminate the weight of 10% corresponding

to the Initial assessment with the objective of concen-

trating the grade (of 100%) in the activity Assessment

of learning SDG. However, qualitative feedback will

be retained in the initial assessment activity so that

student teams can improve the impact analysis in the

ﬁnal activity.

The current rubric rewards (at the top level) di-

rect positive impact on at least two objectives, and

we have detected that some students force the justi-

ﬁcation of alignment to ensure maximum assessment.

For this reason, a modiﬁcation to the rubric has been

proposed to avoid this over-alignment of objectives.

In addition to the modiﬁcation of the rubric, the

aim is to train teachers in the SDGs. It has been com-

plex for teachers to be able to evaluate adequately. For

this reason, speciﬁc training for teachers will be pro-

posed for the following year.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was carried out by the Software and

Systems Engineering research group of Mondragon

Unibertsitatea (IT519-22), supported by the Depart-

ment of Education, Universities and Research of the

Basque Government.

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