Mechanical engineering has been the driving force of the German economy in the past century. Mechanical engineers have been enjoying a high reputation ever since the industrial revolution. A steadily increasing number of students joined the university to enroll in mechanical engineering. However, the numbers of students are declining recently. Experts speculate about the reasons; the causes may be linked to the current green movement and a decreasing reputation of mechanical engineering related to the Dieselgate, or an old-fashioned status due to emerging technologies in the field of digitalization and uprising tech-companies. In order to increase the interest of high school students towards the field of mechanical engineering, we created an app based on gamified engineering educational, that aims to teach the holistic interdisciplinary nature of mechanical engineering and its benefits for a sustainable, digital world. The content is taught superficially and is supposed to invoke curiosity towards mechanical engineering. The gamified content was developed by considering intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of self-determination theory and is combined with player types that have been researched as a foundation of gamification theory.

In times of social media and data privacy an understanding of data is becoming increasingly important. While a lot of research about the technical aspect of data already exists (e.g. collecting, storing, analyzing), we identified a lack of research regarding the human component. Our analysis (including literature review and a survey among undergraduate students) showed, that even though in our digitalized world especially young people interact with data on a daily basis they are lacking skills to properly understand data. These skills are key competencies of Data Literacy. Facing that problem, we have created an educational framework for undergraduate engineering students in order to equip them with a set of skills (Data Literacy) to achieve awareness and transparency regarding data. This framework is based on 3 major pillars: the technical, the legal and the ethical perspective.

Mastering the digital transformation has been one of the most pressing issues for mechanical engineers in Germany, as reflected by various initiatives in the field of Industrie 4.0 that have emerged throughout the last decade. While research in this field is continuously increasing and Master courses addressing Industrie 4.0 and virtual product development enjoy rising participation numbers, the curriculum of undergraduate mechanical engineering students at our university has not changed significantly in recent years to reflect this transformation. Especially in the first two years of the curriculum, the focus lies on classical engineering fundamentals. The challenge for the computer science education of first year mechanical engineering students is consequently to adapt the learning outcomes to reflect the growing importance of computer and programming skills with the restriction not to increase the required time commitment, thus remaining compatible to the current framework of the undergraduate mechanical engineering program. In this paper, we present our approach of introducing an active learning course design with Python in addition to MATLAB into the existing course framework.