Education and Sustainability: a model for different Engineering degrees

Abstract

Technologies related to the Internet of Things (IoT) have seen remarkable growth in recent years. This has facilitated, among many other reasons, that monitoring systems have spread in many everyday areas, including both industry and the services and systems of the so-called smart home. These systems can also be applied in Engineering and in Education for the different existing engineering degrees; and one of the fields is sustainability. A project related to sustainability and student practices has been launched at our university. In this way, several objectives are achieved at the same time, such as the transfer of knowledge from universities to society, and also the development of sustainable education, in line with the sustainable development goals. In this framework, we want to apply the ideas of monitoring through IoT applications, by means of the measurement of certain environmental factors that occur both in an urban garden and in a composting process. Only open hardware-based devices have been used in the project. The proposed model can be applied in other areas of knowledge, having considered different alternatives and having chosen the best elements, based on sustainability criteria, for each section of the project. Specifically, in the system that has been created, the environmental factors of a small urban garden and also of a composting box can be measured. Both sections of the project, garden and composting, are located at the university. The factors to be measured are the following: air temperature, air humidity, soil moisture, ultraviolet radiation and amount of light (luminosity) received in the urban garden; and temperature and humidity in the composting process.