Associating learning technology to sustain the environment through green mobile applications

Abstract

Today, there is a great urge to “Go Green” in many facets in our life, such as reducing the consumption of energy and creating more eco-friendly products as a solution to reduce the crisis that we might face in the future. Computing devices are quickly spreading in our world. Thinking of the amount of devices that are harming the environment through their energy consumption and their toxic wastes urges us to think of a solution that preserves the environment and our well-being. With “quality education” a major issue for the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, it is a must that we loop together the “quality education” with education per se. It is imperative that we engage the youth in attaining this objective, for it is not enough that we empower them with the tools, we must encourage them to look at the current issues outside the box, through a worldwide view, where the focus nowadays is on the environment, be it in reducing fuel usage, decreasing air and water pollution, and recycling, in brief, being environment friendly. In this paper, we stress the increased number of mobile devices usage and show the importance of having green applications to save the environment and preserve our health. The paper proposes a model with four metrics – energy, economic metric, performance, and energy/performance metric that aims to provide a design for mobile applications that address some of the concerns related to the environment. The proposed model was implemented on a mobile application and the results are compared to a regular application that does not take into consideration the “green” environment. The results proved that the application that follows the defined metrics preserves the environment and performs better than the regular application design. Thus, it presents a stepping stone towards linking learning technology while at the same time sustaining the environment.