Engineers without borders challenge: Implementing sustainability in German engineering education

Abstract

The twenty-first century is highly influenced by globalization, climate change and an increasing dependence on technologies. Education in general needs to foster these trends, but especially engineering education needs to impart knowledge about the necessity and the possibilities of sustainable development to students. The Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Challenge offers an innovative opportunity to integrate sustainability into engineering curricula. Although the EWB Challenge is well established in other countries, RWTH Aachen University is the only university in Germany that has implemented the EWB Challenge into the engineering curricula so far. This paper aims at presenting the process of implementing the EWB Challenge in Germany. In the course of this implementation, the concept was evaluated with the help of a standardized questionnaire; an overview of the results gained from this evaluation is provided in this paper as well. The evaluation served to gain diverse information e.g. about the perception of the challenge in general, its impact on the amount of knowledge gained by the students, and also about the challenge's potentials for improvement. First analyses show, that the overall quality of the EWB Challenge at RWTH Aachen University was marked as "good". Asides from that, the analyses also indicate that the students most benefit from a great amount of gained knowledge and their improved ability to adapt technologies depending on the situational context and the underlying social and cultural structures. Yet, the results show that there are also aspects of the challenge-concept that need some improvement. One of these aspects is to enhance the students' awareness of the social responsibilities of engineers.