The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in changes in learning methods and attitudes in the STEM fields. The pandemic forced institutions of higher education to explore remote teaching/learning systems and tools some of which remain in use today. Such remote teaching/learning systems and tools present challenges for most STEM fields that involve hands-on experiences through laboratory or workshop environments that require access to devices, instruments and/or equipment. The engaged student learning through IoT project was introduced as a means to enable students to perform hands-on learning activities in their own time and space with minimal need for and dependence on university laboratory resources. In this paper, we describe engaged student learning through problem- and project-based learning (PBL) in IoT-based projects in senior capstone design courses at two Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Particular attention is paid to engagement and learning of historically under-represented student groups in capstone teams. Students in multidisciplinary teams borrowed IoT devices for the duration of their course work to discover and learn on their own with instructor guidance and developed course materials. The evaluation of the student performance and feedback indicate that students have benefited from access to IoT devices outside the laboratory environments by developing creative solutions to the undertaken capstone projects as well as problem-solving skills that are expected in the workforce. In this statistically small student sample size, there were no notable differences observed in the success of historically underrepresented students vs. all other students in the IoT-based projects in terms of engaged student learning. The IoT devices enabled the teams to undertake multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects that involved mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering technology, and computer science students, each contributing to different objectives of the project to achieve the overall goal.

Unlike other professions that require post-baccalaureate education, engineering education must offer graduates not only technical depth but also professional acumen like ethics, communication, and team effectiveness during the undergraduate program. While engineering ethics has traditionally focused on two major ethical theories - deontology and consequentialism - which emphasize compliance-based rules and responsibilities, virtue ethics is a third and less prominent lens of ethics that offers a more humanistic approach to dilemmas facing engineers in everyday practice. Virtue ethics, which is often associated with character education and character development, can guide engineers with professional growth in areas of teamwork, collaboration, leadership, communication, and most certainly ethical reasoning. Virtue ethics offers a lens upon which to understand dispositions so that we can think and act responsibly. Virtues like integrity, courage, service, purpose, humility, justice, empathy, resilience, curiosity, and practical wisdom are essential to the practice of engineering. Virtuous engineers are responsible engineers who use their judgement to balance conflicting demands. This session serves the purpose of engaging the engineering and computing educators to understand virtue ethics and the importance of character education with a primary focus on moral and civic virtues (honesty, courage, justice, self-control, compassion, generosity, empathy) in alignment with intellectual and performance virtues (critical thinking, resilience, teamwork, curiosity, creativity). Pedagogical approaches will be discussed during this session and participants will have the opportunity to identify everyday situations where virtue ethics can be applied to support character and leadership development for their students.

When preparing engineering students for professional practice, the importance of their engagement in global, social, and ethical dimensions of engineering cannot be overemphasized. The importance of ethics is well discussed in engineering education literature, but much less is known about how to effectively prepare graduates for the complex global, social, and ethical challenges of engineering practice. Studies have found that common challenges to engineering ethics education include lack of student interest, resistance from faculty, and a lack of consensus regarding topics and pedagogical methods to include in already saturated curricula.We believe a character-focused approach to engineering ethics education could address these challenges by providing language and tools that are easily accessible to students and faculty for engaging ethical challenges in engineering and addressing students' development as individuals and future professionals. This paper investigates recent pedagogical efforts to implement character education in undergraduate engineering education through a scoping literature review. The resulting synthesis of 30 publications reveals a variety of pedagogical approaches, the majority of which are student centered and already commonly used by engineering educators. Our findings indicate that character education is indeed a viable and accessible approach to engineering ethics education. Learning assessment was largely limited across observed interventions, so future studies are needed to examine student and faculty engagement as well as impact on students’ ethical decision-making processes.

The complexity of engineering practice requires engineers to make decisions for the betterment of society and public welfare. What role should character education play in engineering education? How might we better prepare engineers to tackle the complexity of real-world practice with virtues like integrity, humility, courage, purpose, empathy, practical wisdom, curiosity, creativity, justice, resilience, authenticity, etc.? In this special session, we invite engineers and engineering educators to rethink how we might educate the whole engineer holistically leveraging what we know about character education. The goals for the session will enable participants to: (1) Gain a common understanding of character education. (2) Reflect on the role that character education should play in engineering education. (3) Brainstorm ways upon which one might integrate character education in one's engineering course. (4) Develop some shared visioning for collective impact as engineering educators.

Engineering students conceptualize problems in diverse ways depending how the problems are presented. In this study, we investigate how different representations of problems, such as with images and sketches versus traditional word description of problems, allow students to recall information. Some students experience difficulties visualizing a concept when given a word problem while others do not have the same difficulty. A plausible explanation is that students who have less difficulties may be more creative problem solvers or have a better understanding of the material. Data for this study was taken from 132 students enrolled in an introductory thermodynamics course in a large Midwestern university. Half of the participants (n=65) were asked to recognize applications of Laws of Thermodynamics in comparison to the other half (n=67) who were presented with images and asked to identify which Law of Thermodynamics was being depicted. We hypothesized that a higher percentage of students presented with only the images would answer correctly questions of the Laws of Thermodynamics compared to the students who were presented with a standard text description of the problems and asked to answer the questions. The results did not corroborate with our hypothesis. Findings revealed nearly identical performance. In this exploratory study, we discuss outcomes in terms of the underlying links between students' abilities to recall information and the potential of visual representations to enhance learning of thermodynamics-related concepts.