ECOding: Putting climate solutions at the heart of tech education

Coding education is gaining more and more importance today. Coding improves general thinking skills by giving individuals the ability to solve problems. It also encourages creativity and innovation, giving students the opportunity to develop their own projects and create new solutions. One area where coding can be used is the climate crisis problem that threatens our planet. ECOding aims to integrate environmental and climate change education with an interdisciplinary approach while providing coding education to students. Within the scope of the project carried out in a vocational high school in Türkiye, while teaching coding to students in Object Oriented Programming, Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning courses, the focus was on the environmental problems that our world faces. Coding examples shared with students, homework assignments, and project studies focused on the climate crisis. This situation not only raised students' awareness but also supported them to create technology-supported solutions to the climate crisis. Students measured their carbon footprints with the software they prepared and gave suggestions on how to reduce their carbon footprints according to their answers. A project that enables students to open the right waste bin in seconds for easier recycling of a waste shown on a camera with object recognition gave students the opportunity to participate in an international project competition. The students, who designed an educational software introducing hydrogen fuel cells using gamification, succeeded in winning the first prize in an international project competition. Within the scope of the project, which has been carried out for about 3 years, more than 200 students have received coding training with this approach. At the end of the academic year, the opinions of the students were taken and all of the students stated that seeking solutions to the climate crisis through coding made them happy, fun and instructive. More than half of the students stated that they developed a project idea for the climate crisis at the end of the course. The successes in the implementation process made the project visible in the international arena in a short time. In 2021, the project coordinator was awarded the Green Skills Award organised by the European Training Foundation (ETF) and UNESCO. Finally, the project coordinator was selected by JCI as one of the Ten Successful Young People of the World in the category of Environmental Protection and Moral Leadership. The project, which is frequently shared both in Türkiye and Europe, has started to be implemented in many schools.