Abstract: This brief in-class activity builds off of pre-assigned video overviews and asks students to map the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals to the 14 NAE Grand Challenges of Engineering.

Course: First Year Engineering, but it can also be applied in other courses, extra curricular clubs, or with K-12 engineering sessions.

Topic: 'What is Engineering' or 'Engineering Impact'   

Type: In-class Activity

Time: 35 minutes (with 15 minutes of pre-class video hw)  

Materials: Digital whiteboard (such as Miro) or printed handout.

Overview

This activity builds on students' preliminary prior knowledge or exploration of both the NAE Grand Challenges of Engineering and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In specific, students (for homework or as a part of the class activity) should watch the suggested videos on both sets of goals. As the first part of the activity, student pairs pick a NAE Grand Challenge to explore in-depth, with 10 minutes of research and then a short sampling of pairs will report-out to the class.

Following this exploration and sharing, students are asked to open a digital whiteboard app (such as Miro) that has been pre-populated with sticky notes or visual spaces for each of the 14 NAE Grand Challenges. Student teams must then create a sticky-note for each of the 17 UN SDGS and overlay it on the NAE Grand Challenge it best aligns with. Not all connections will be obvious, and others might not fit any. I recommend assigning only a subset of the UN SDGs to each team as mapping all 17 could take too long. 

This card helps students to explicitly build connections between two various sets of engineering goals, and explore how engineering might solve the larger problems the world faces today.

Method

1. (~15 minutes, pre-class or as start of activity) PreClass HW Videos of the NAE Grand Challenges and/or UN SDGs
2. 10 min: Pick-Your-Own NAE Grand Challenge paired research:
3. 5-10 min: NAE Grand Challenge Report out
4. 10 UN SDG to NAE Grand Challenge digital mapping
5. 5 min: Discussion and wrap-up. Call attention to how easy/hard it was to make the connections between the two and any “gaps”