Getting Students to Explore Engineering Ethics through Debate-Style Presentations
- Conference
- Location
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East Lansing, Michigan
- Publication Date
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July 26, 2020
- Start Date
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July 26, 2020
- End Date
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July 28, 2020
- Page Count
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3
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--35765
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/35765
- Download Count
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250
Paper Authors
Ashish D Borgaonkar New Jersey Institute of Technology
Dr. Ashish Borgaonkar works as Asst. Professor of Engineering Education at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Newark College of Engineering located in Newark, New Jersey. He has developed and taught several engineering courses primarily in first-year engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and general engineering. He has won multiple awards for excellence in instruction. He also has worked on several research projects, programs, and initiatives to help students bridge the gap between high school and college as well as preparing students for the rigors of mathematics. His research interests include engineering education, integration of novel technologies into engineering classroom, excellence in instruction, water, and wastewater treatment, civil engineering infrastructure, and transportation engineering.
Chizhong Wang New Jersey Institute of Technology
Chizhong Wang received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin, China, in 2013 and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, US in 2015.
He is currently a Ph. D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering department of New Jersey Institute of Technology. His current research interests include biomedical signal processing, wearable medical devices, image processing, and Engineering Education.
Moshe Kam P.E. New Jersey Institute of Technology
Moshe Kam serves at present as Dean of the Newark College of Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Earlier he served as the Robert Quinn Professor and Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University. His education is in Electrical Engineering (B.S., Tel Aviv University (1976); M.S.(1985) and Ph.D. (1987), Drexel University). Kam's professional interests are in detection and estimation, multi-sensor systems, data and decision fusion, and engineering
education. He served as IEEE's Vice President for Educational Activities (2005-2007), and as President and CEO (2011). Kam is a Fellow of IEEE "for contributions to the theory of decision fusion and distributed detection." He received the IEEE Haraden Pratt Award and the HKN C. Holmes MacDonald Award "for the Outstanding Young Electrical Engineering Educator."
Jaskirat Sodhi New Jersey Institute of Technology
Dr. Jaskirat Sodhi is interested in first-year engineering curriculum design and recruitment, retention and success of engineering students. He is the coordinator of ENGR101, an application-oriented course for engineering students placed in pre-calculus courses. He has also developed and co-teaches the Fundamentals of Engineering Design course that includes a wide spectra of activities to teach general engineering students the basics of engineering design using a hands-on approach which is also engaging and fun. He is an Institute for Teaching Excellence Fellow and the recipient of NJIT's 2018 Saul K. Fenster Innovation in Engineering Education Award.
Abstract
Professionalism and ethics are at the core of any professional career and particularly so in engineering because of the direct impact on human life engineers have. Ethics and ethical dilemma can be taught to students in creative ways to make them more relatable. The authors have used expert lectures and debate presentations to provide students with an opportunity to explore the grey nature of the engineering ethical dilemmas in their Fundamentals of Engineering Design 101 courses. The lectures provided the students with the knowledge and ethical decision guidelines to help them analyze and make a decision on the problems. For the debate presentations, students in teams of two are assigned topics that contained fictional scenarios based on real-life examples and a binary question to debate on. Student teams need to research these scenarios and present them to the class in the form of debates. The aim is to help the students to explore the conflict, apply the knowledge presented during the lecture to make a decision and support their argument, and make a fact-based debate presentation. Students appreciated learning about these important topics during their first year and felt that they will benefit from this activity throughout their engineering career.
Borgaonkar, A. D., & Wang, C., & Kam, M., & Sodhi, J. (2020, July), Getting Students to Explore Engineering Ethics through Debate-Style Presentations Paper presented at 2020 First-Year Engineering Experience, East Lansing, Michigan. 10.18260/1-2--35765
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