2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The recent growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry has been met with an increase in attention towards incorporating ethical considerations into the development of AI and human decision making. This attention is noticeable within engineering education, where ethics courses are typically absent in engineering curricula that train future engineers to develop AI technologies (Saltz et al., 2019). Artificial intelligence technologies operate as black boxes, presenting both developers and users with a certain level of obscurity concerning their decision-making processes and a diminished potential for negotiating with its outputs (Issar & Aneesh, 2022) This framing leads to the question: How, if at all, do student developers integrate ethical awareness into their conceptualization and praxis of development of AI technologies? The implementation of active learning tools and methods has the potential to engage students with the social implications of algorithmic decision making, such as bias, security, transparency and other ethical and moral dilemmas. However, there are few studies that examine how students learn AI ethics in electrical and computer engineering courses. This paper explores the integration of STEMtelling, a pedagogical storytelling tool, into a machine learning course. STEMtelling is a novel approach that invites students (STEMtellers) to center their own interests, experiences and cultures through writing and sharing engineering stories (STEMtells) to build an epistemic culture. Through the STEMtelling process, STEMtellers blur the boundaries between social and technical knowledge to place themselves in the center of knowledge production. In this context, STEMtellers learn social and ethical dimensions of AI and machine learning. In each iteration of STEMtelling, students write and share stories about their personal experiences with creating and using AI-based programs. Employing ethnographic methods that involve semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations, as well as thematic analysis of written STEMtells, this study examines how students consider ethical considerations through STEMtelling and how STEMtelling contributes to their understanding of social responsibility within engineering. Findings from this study will be incorporated into the development of STEMtelling as a pedagogical tool in engineering education and highlight themes and challenges of teaching and learning ethics in electrical and computer engineering education.