In 2020, an IQP team of WPI students (Emily Baker, Rui Huang, and Akash Shaji), advised by Professors Thomas Balistrieri and Sarah Wodin-Schwartz, created a pilot searchable database of WPI courses by SDG and department.
In 2022, the Office of Sustainability and the Information Technology team at WPI migrated this site to WPI: https://sdg-courses.wpi.edu/
As the IQP team explained,
"Our project aims to promote sustainability in education for WPI faculty and students. We interviewed faculty who already teach sustainability themed curriculum and surveyed their students to find out what sustainability topics are currently being covered at WPI and what topics students want to learn about. We used this information to generate our deliverable: a website that serves both students and faculty. It allows for students to filter through sustainable courses by subject or sustainability topic. It allows faculty to have easy access to ways sustainability can be integrated in curriculum, potential help for doing so, and the student interest in sustainability topics and delivery methods."
The students' IQP, Sustainable Studies: Mapping Sustainability in WPI Curricula, is available through WPI's open digital archive, Digital WPI.
In addition, WPI submits sustainability course data to be evaluated by the AASHE Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating Survey (STARS), which is used each year by the Princeton Review Green Colleges survey and Sierra Club Cool Schools survey.
The Great Problems Seminar (GPS) at WPI is a two-term course that immerses first-year students into university-level research and introduces them to the project-based curriculum at WPI through courses with themes that tackle the world's great problems, from creating livable cities to addressing climate change.
Students completing the GPS course create posters that are archived in Digital WPI and associated with relevant UN SDGs.
