There has been growing awareness since the 1980s of the importance of ethics in engineering education (Herkert 2002) as educators recognize that engineering students need to look beyond technical issues to have awareness of the greater social context of their work (Colby and Sullivan 2008).
Ethics is, however, a difficult subject to teach to engineering students.
To be taught successfully the topic must be made relevant to students so that they can engage with it on both emotional and intellectual levels (McDonald and Donleavey 1995; Barry and Ohland 2009).
Yet for students who are accustomed to laboratory work, quantitative analysis, and goals with clearly defined outcomes, engineering ethics can be a ‘messy’ subject that they have difficulty in becoming engrossed in, despite finding the general subject area interesting (Newberry 2004; Harris et al. 1996; Billington 2006).