Piloting an Ethics Choose-Your-Own Adventure Activity in Early Engineering Education

Engineering requires designing, redesigning, and developing new technologies that can have large positive impacts on society. But engineering can also come with negative, often unforeseen, consequences, side effects, or by-products. Dynamite, combustion engines, and opioids are a few examples of these positive contributions that later have had significant negative impacts. Understanding, evaluating and mitigating those negative consequences is a large part of all engineers' duty to society. This requires students have an understanding of the ethical and societal impacts of their engineering choices. In this work, we present an interactive, team-based, choose-your-own adventure activity that gives students the opportunity to practice the process of ethical decision-making based on an engineering scenario that has unforeseen negative impacts. Students navigate through the negative consequences of not only their personal decisions, but the decisions made by theoretical peers, management and customers. Our aims for this project are two-fold: 1) to help undergraduate students see that engineering decisions made during the design, production, or even after launch of a product can have larger consequences than originally anticipated; 2) to determine if hands-on ethical problem solving activities in the classroom increases student capability in ethical decision making. We have introduced this choose-your-own adventure activity in two courses: the college-wide first-year Introduction to Engineering Problem Solving course and the second-year chemical engineering Process Calculations course. This work-in-progress will present initial feedback from students who have participated in the activity and an assessment of student ethical decision making ability based on the Engineering Science and Issues Test (ESIT), comparing students that participated in the hands-on activities to those that received instruction only via lecture.