About So Are We Really Ethical Enginers?
From fighting climate change to improving global health and wellbeing, engineering should make the world a better place, but this will only happen if the innovators of the future, in other words children going through school right now, are motivated and committed to ethical engineering.
Following the successful ‘Really Small Science’ engagement model developed over the past years, the So Are We Really Ethical Engineers? project connected teams of schoolchildren from deprived areas of the West of Scotland, with mentor research engineers from the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Strathclyde, to actively explore together the ethical issues behind the mentors’ engineering work—from pharmaceuticals, energy and environment to water, materials and food.
Key outcomes
School teams explored for themselves, guided by their mentors, the key ethical questions behind key sectors: who is affected by, how to achieve ethical social progress through, and how do we ensure an ethical future from, ground-breaking engineering. The engineer mentors were in their turn encouraged to consider how they can put the ethics of engineering front and centre throughout their own careers.
School teams produced presentations exploring the ethics of engineering: valuable resources for the next generations, to help ensure long-term, wide-ranging impact on people within and outwith engineering. Children at school now will be impacted by, and hopefully involved in, engineering throughout their lives. The project was about helping the coming generations feel informed and empowered to ask: So Are We Really Ethical Engineers?
