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).