Ethics for First-Year STEM: A Risk Assessment Based Approach.

This paper describes the development of a first-year seminar focused on the discussion of ethical issues in engineering for STEM students. The seminar course is intended to provide a broad introduction to ethics through discussions and writing assignments focused on case studies of engineering catastrophes, meeting once a week for ninety minutes, as well as encourage students in college level critical thinking skills. Involving first year students with both technical and philosophical discussions, showing the broader reach of engineering, can be critical in the retention of students to engineering as well as the translation of engineering ethics to other STEM majors. The main goal of the seminar is to engage first year STEM students to discuss ethics from an engineering perspective, give them tools beyond their intuition, and assist them in their transition into collegiate level academic work. Students are introduced to a risk assessment based approach to ethical decision making. This approach attempts to incorporate the basic questions of risk-benefit analysis with information on the decision makers, constraints and context, and implementation of the system. This simplified framework is employed to allow students to more easily explore complex catastrophes from multiple points of view and draw parallels with current technological issues, with these skills significantly improving over the course of the semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]