| Science, technology, and industry are beneficial to humankind in innumerable ways, but they have repeatedly been shown to lack ethics, love, compassion, and balance. Ethical issues will always be with humanity because they arise from a basic characteristic of human kind, free will. Free will enables people to react to identical events in diverse ways, leading to varied outcomes. Some of these outcomes are deemed righteous by society, others are deemed evil. However, over the past few centuries, science, technology, and industry have grown exponentially leading to spectacular advancements such as placing a man on the moon, while insufficient attention was paid to the ethical growth of engineers leading to equally spectacular disasters such as environmental pollution. Professional codes of conduct came into being to establish minimum standards to protect the public and to provide moral guidelines to engineers. Codes or dogma became the first pedagogical tool used in teaching engineering ethics followed by heuristics and case studies. A Simulator for Engineering Ethics Education (SEES) was created to improve ethical training by incorporating and superseding the current methods of teaching engineering ethics. SEEE benefits from the use of multi-media simulation software and relies upon survey data to drive it. SEEE teaches engineering ethics by placing the student in first person, dynamic, interactive, real-time, and scenario-based situations simulating genuine ethical dilemmas. Students gather data, assess the situation, and make decisions throughout each scenario, receiving feedback in accordance with each decision. This enables students to not just learn what to do, but more importantly, to develop their individual moral autonomy, which is an individual's ability to self-identify and self-respond to ethically questionable engineering situations. Both non-parametric and parametric tests were done to evaluate the results and test for teaching effectiveness. |
