2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering ethics is an area of increasing importance today, and this sentiment is shared by educators and budding engineers alike. However, engineering curricula do not often integrate ethics related to engineering specific topics. And even when these topics are incorporated, students are often left wanting to know how they would apply historical or philosophical knowledge of ethics in their future engineering industry lives that they are preparing for. We share our multi-year, multidisciplinary endeavours in understanding the problem area through qualitative interviews and surveys. We also describe our attempts to integrate engineering ethics in different courses for different audiences, in different capacities. Our goal of this work is to help students better engage with engineering ethics and feel a better sense of ownership and a clearer understanding of their future responsibilities towards ethics in daily decision making. We leverage discussion, teamwork, guided questions, role playing and decision making games to help students engage with seemingly esoteric topics. We help students build and employ their own frameworks, vocabulary and sense of rubric for tackling simple decisions, while also considering their potential ethical connotations and implications. Throughout this entire process, we were careful to employ student participation and feedback at all stages, allowing for a strongly student-driven approach. Students explored ethical education of engineers and developed digital learning tools, as those served as excellent opportunities for students to engage with this subject matter in with depth. We share our lessons and challenges in attempting to find adequate means to assess this work in meeting long-term and far-reaching educational goals.