2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The goal of this project was to assess how students’ engineering identity, engineering career intentions, and systems thinking attitudes changed during a first-year general education engineering course that incorporated Engineering for One Planet curricula.
Our first-year engineering class is both a general education class for students who are interested in STEM and an introductory class for engineering majors. One goal of this class is to recruit and retain students in our engineering major and minor. Teaching students about the role of engineering in sustainable development is an opportunity to broaden their understanding of who can be an engineer and the sociotechnical work engineers do .
To accomplish our recruitment and retention goals, we include technical and social sustainability content aligned with the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Framework in our course. EOP is an instructional framework designed by educators through the American Society of Engineering Education and the Lemelson Foundation to assist in training engineering students in social and technical sustainability competencies. In our course, students use systems mapping to visualize product lifecycles and use lifecycle assessment to estimate environmental impacts from those products. Our goal is that all students at our university can develop confidence using engineering tools through this sociotechnical experience of the work engineers do for human well-being.
We surveyed students before and after the course to assess changes in their attitudes toward systems thinking, and we analyzed their systems maps produced during the course for use of systems thinking toolsets. We also surveyed students before and after the class regarding either a) their engineering identity (for students planning an engineering major) or b) their intentions to use engineering in their future work (for non-engineering majors).
In this paper, we provide a description of our course materials for sociotechnical sustainability education and analyze the results of our student surveys regarding systems thinking, engineering identity, and career intentions before and after our course.