Sustainability Themed Problem Solving In Data Structures And Algorithms Ali Erkan * aerkan@ithaca.edu Ithaca College 401B Williams Hall Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. Tom Pfaff † tpfaff@ithaca.edu Ithaca College 311A Williams Hall Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. Jason Hamilton ‡ jhamilton@ithaca.edu Ithaca College 252 Cntr. Nat. Sci. Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. Michael Rogers § mrogers@ithaca.edu Ithaca College 265 Cntr. Nat. Sci. Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. ABSTRACT During the past two years, we have been creating curric- ular material centered around complex problems rooted in sustainability. Since multidisciplinary learning is one of our primary goals, these projects are most meaningful when they connect students from different disciplines working toward a common understanding. However, strong disciplinary com- ponents present in their solutions also allow us to frame these projects from strictly disciplinary perspectives; in this paper, we show how they can be used for increased engage- ment in the context of data structures and algorithms. In an earlier publication, we presented a project for computer science students to analyze the changes in the size and the ice-concentrations of the Arctic. In this paper, we review two new ones to explore (i) the structural characteristics of the western part of the U.S. power-grid, and (ii) challenges of sustainably harvesting fish. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and In- formation Science Education—Computer science education ; J.2 [Physical Sciences And Engineering]: Earth and at- * Associate Professor of Computer Science. † Associate Professor of Mathematics. ‡ Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Studies. § Associate Professor of Physics. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE’12, February 29–March 3, 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1098-7/12/02 ...$10.00. mospheric sciences; E.1 [Data Structures]: Arrays, graphs and networks, lists, stacks, and queues General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Experimentation Keywords Scientific computing, active learning 1. INTRODUCTION Most significant problems of the 21st century require sys- tems thinking. Consequently, we are now witnessing the growing importance of producing professionals with the skills to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries [17, 12]. Unfor- tunately, despite individual efforts and contributions (such as [10] and [20] for Computer Science), Science, Technol- ogy, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education in general has not been evolving sufficiently fast [2] and is therefore in need of additional attention to address the deficit [18]. We (four faculty members of our institute representing Computer Science, Mathematics, Biology, and Physics) are working on creating an NSF supported framework to address an undergraduate component of this deficit [7]. Specifically, we are focusing on the problems encountered in sustain- ability and formulating a method for them to be addressed by students from different disciplines. Since our curricular products are meant to work seamlessly within existing dis- ciplinary and administrative structures of higher education, our approach is to be contrasted with others that require new resources, such as those proposed in [19, 21, 3] (for STEM education) and [15] (for computational sciences). Our sustainability themed modules are built around real- world problems too complex to belong to a single discipline. Students from participating courses address these problems using their disciplinary techniques and produce technical reports to convey their findings; in the process, they also read technical reports coming from their peers from other disciplines. At the end of a module, students respond to