Patterns of Engagement : Using a board game as a tool to address sustainability in engineering educations

The Global Dimension in Engineering Education (GDEE) refers to all non-technical topics that will impact the engineering profession at a global level over the next couple of decades. As teachers at a Media Technology engineering programme at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Communication, we have definitely felt that substantial amounts of ingenuity is required to make students interested in such topics, since many of the students regard them as non- central or of little interest when compared to their (non-GDEE) “core” interests, skills and aspirations. We here describe how we have worked to overcome students’ (potential) aversion to one particular GDEE topic, sustainability, by incorporating a board game, Gasuco, into the introductory module of a course about “Media Technology and Sustainability”. We describe and analyse our use of the game in terms of “pedagogical patterns for learning” (Laudrillard, 2012). QC 20161216