This paper examines how young peoples’ lived experiences with personal
technologies can be used to teach engineering ethics in a way which facilitates
greater engagement with the subject. Engineering ethics can be challenging to teach:
as a form of practical ethics, it is framed around future workplace experience in a
professional setting which students are assumed to have no prior experience of. Yet
the current generations of engineering students, who have been described as ‘digital
natives’, do however have immersive personal experience with digital technologies;
and experiential learning theory describes how students learn ethics more successfully
when they can draw on personal experience which give context and
meaning to abstract theories. This paper reviews current teaching practices in
engineering ethics; and examines young people’s engagement with technologies
including cell phones, social networking sites, digital music and computer games to
identify social and ethical elements of these practices which have relevance for the
engineering ethics curricula. From this analysis three case studies are developed to
illustrate how facets of the use of these technologies can be drawn on to teach topics
including group work and communication; risk and safety; and engineering as social
experimentation. Means for bridging personal experience and professional ethics
when teaching these cases are discussed. The paper contributes to research and
curriculum development in engineering ethics education, and to wider education
research about methods of teaching ‘the net generation’.