The use of PBL for sensitizing students to environmental issues

This paper describes the students´ awareness regarding the methods employed to mitigate the negative impact of computers on the environment. Several topics considered important by the students were analyzed - transforming computers into recyclable waste, increasing users´ awareness toward extending computer lifetime, encouraging the reuse of old and obsolete computers, employing new ecological materials in computers from the perspective of future engineers and protection of computers against accidental damage. The conducted research activities were based on the PBL (Problem based Learning) method. The main goal of the project envisages the analysis and the simulation of computer over-voltage protection systems. The starting and the ending activities of this project consisted in anonymous student surveys. The survey results are analyzed in this paper.