Educational Game Boosts Sustainability and Ethics Skills in Engineering Students

Engineering students in Colombia have shown measurable gains in sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility competencies after playing an educational game designed to make them confront the real-world consequences of their technical decisions. The finding comes from a quasi-experimental study conducted at Institución Universitaria ITM in Medellín, a Latin American higher education institution whose engineering programs are now testing whether game-based learning can reshape how future engineers think about the social and environmental footprint of their profession. The research, published open access in Discover Sustainability, offers some of the clearest quantitative evidence yet that a single game-based intervention can shift how students weigh sustainability against the pressures of technical practice.

The study was led by Andrés Fernando Jiménez Areiza of ITM’s Departamento de Electromecánica y Mecatrónica, together with Sara María Yepes Zuluaga and Willer Ferney Montes Granada of the Departamento de Electrónica y Telecomunicaciones. Their work was funded through project P24205, an institutional initiative titled Evaluation of a training pathway designed at the mesocurricular level for the development of ethics, social responsibility, and sustainability competencies in engineering programs, which also involved the Institución Universitaria Salazar y Herrera, known as IUSH. The team set out to evaluate a training pathway built across the curriculum, using the game as the centerpiece of a mesocurricular strategy intended to develop competencies that traditional lecture-based teaching has struggled to instill.

The motivation behind the research reflects a broader anxiety within the engineering community. The accelerated pace of technological innovation, combined with growing pressure on natural resources, has intensified concerns about the social and environmental implications of engineering practice. In response, the authors argue that engineering education requires a paradigmatic shift that systematically incorporates ethical, humanistic, and socio-environmental competencies into teaching and learning processes. In Latin America, where infrastructure decisions often intersect directly with vulnerable communities and fragile ecosystems, the stakes of such a shift are particularly high. Engineers trained without a strong sense of social responsibility may design systems that are technically elegant but socially or environmentally harmful, and the researchers see the classroom as the first place where such failures can be prevented.

Methodologically, the study adopted a quantitative, quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test measurements for an experimental group of 84 engineering students. A reference control group of 22 students was assessed only at pre-test, owing to logistical and curricular time constraints at the end of the academic term. This asymmetry is important for interpreting the results: because the control group was not measured after the intervention period, the researchers could not fully rule out alternative explanations for the observed gains, such as maturation, repeated exposure to the measurement instrument, or parallel curricular activities. The authors themselves caution that causal inferences should be interpreted with care given the study design, a level of transparency that is increasingly valued in educational research where perfect experimental control is rarely feasible in real academic settings.

The intervention itself consisted of a game-based learning experience designed to foster critical reflection, responsible decision-making, and a systemic understanding of the potential social and environmental impacts of engineering practice. Game-based learning, or GBL, is grounded in the idea that structured play can simulate complex scenarios in ways that lectures cannot, forcing participants to make decisions, observe consequences, and adjust their reasoning in real time. In the context of engineering education, such games can place students inside dilemmas where cost, safety, environmental impact, and community interests collide, requiring them to negotiate trade-offs that professional engineers face daily. The ITM game was developed specifically to trigger these reflective processes, and its design was funded through the institutional project that covered game development, educational materials, and collaborator fees.

The results revealed statistically significant post-test improvements across all assessed competencies within the experimental group, with sustainability exhibiting the largest effect size among the three domains. In terms of effect size, a large Cohen’s effect was observed for sustainability, with a d value of 1.11 and an r of 74 percent, and for social responsibility, with a d of 0.64 and an r of 54 percent. Professional ethics showed a small-to-medium effect, with a d of 0.23 and an r of 23 percent. For readers unfamiliar with these statistics, Cohen’s d expresses the difference between two groups in standard deviation units, with values above 0.8 conventionally considered large, and the r value indicates the magnitude of the overlap between pre- and post-test distributions. An effect size above 1.0, as seen for sustainability, is rare in educational interventions and suggests that the game produced a substantial shift in how students conceptualized sustainability within engineering practice.

The pattern of results is as interesting as their magnitude. Sustainability showed the strongest gain, followed by social responsibility, while professional ethics moved the least. This gradient may reflect the nature of the game itself, which was explicitly designed around systemic understanding of social and environmental impacts, making sustainability the most directly exercised competency. Ethics, by contrast, is often a more abstract and personally mediated competency that may require longer or more varied interventions to shift measurably. The authors suggest that the strategic integration of active learning methodologies into engineering curricula may represent a promising approach for promoting more holistic, ethical, and sustainability-oriented professional formation, and the differential effect sizes provide a roadmap for where future interventions might concentrate their efforts.

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Institución Universitaria ITM under protocol number 02 of May 15, 2024, and all research procedures were performed in accordance with the ethical guidelines and regulations of the Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano and the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided informed consent voluntarily and understood the study’s objectives and the activities involved. Participants were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any time without any consequences, and all necessary measures were taken to ensure confidentiality and proper handling of personal data. The authors declare no competing interests, and the work was carried out within a public institutional framework aimed at improving educational quality rather than commercial gain.

What makes this research resonate beyond Colombia is the growing international consensus that engineering graduates must be formed not only as problem solvers but as responsible professionals who understand the systemic consequences of their work. Accreditation bodies across the world increasingly require evidence of sustainability and ethics competencies, yet many programs still rely on traditional teaching methods that treat these topics as supplementary content rather than core professional skills. The ITM study contributes to a body of evidence suggesting that game-based learning can serve as a practical vehicle for competency development at scale, particularly in institutions where resources for elaborate experiential learning are limited. Because the game was developed and deployed within a regular academic term, the model may be replicable in other Latin American universities facing similar curricular constraints.

At the same time, the researchers are careful about what their data can and cannot show. The lack of a post-test measurement for the control group, the single-institution setting, and the end-of-term timing all limit the strength of causal claims, and the authors explicitly note that the findings suggest, rather than prove, a positive contribution of GBL to SER competency development. Future studies with stronger designs, larger samples, and multiple institutions will be needed to confirm whether the observed gains persist over time and transfer to professional practice. Nevertheless, for a field searching for effective ways to form engineers who can navigate the ethical and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, the Medellín experiment offers a compelling data point: a well-designed game, embedded in a real curriculum, can move the needle on competencies that matter, and it can do so with effect sizes that few conventional teaching strategies have achieved.

Subject of Research: Effect of an educational game on sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility competencies in engineering programs at a Latin American higher education institution

Article Title: Effect of an educational game on sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility competencies in engineering programs at a Latin American higher education institution

Article References: Areiza, A. F. J., Zuluaga, S. M. Y., & Granada, W. F. M. (2026). Effect of an educational game on sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility competencies in engineering programs at a Latin American higher education institution. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-05064-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-05064-x

Keywords: Effect, educational, game, sustainability, ethics, social, responsibility, competencies, engineering, programs, Latin, American