Student Recognition, Use, and Understanding of Engineering for One Planet Competencies and Outcomes in Project-based Learning

Addressing local-to-global crises at the intersection of environmental protection, climate change, sustainability, and social justice will require new skills and competencies in practicing engineers, and the ability to learn from and work with non-engineers in society. Project-based learning provides one approach by which students can learn how to tackle, in open-ended and creative ways, important problems in the world. We examine the impact of a second-year project-based learning course on students' understanding of environmentally and socially responsible engineering. We collected survey data from 122 students, and quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the data through the lens of a newly developed framework called Engineering for One Planet (EOP). Our analyses show that the project-based learning course had a moderate to large impact on student competencies that comprise the EOP framework. We believe the EOP framework can be considered as a guiding framework in designing courses and curriculum to better prepare students for future engineering work.