Fostering Situated Ethical Awareness in First-Year Engineering Students Through Board-Game-Based Learning: A Mixed-Methods Study at Two Colombian Universities

Engineering ethics education faces the challenge of moving students from abstract principles toward context-sensitive decision-making. This exploratory mixed-methods study examined associations between participation in a board-game-based strategy and patterns consistent with situated ethical awareness in first-semester engineering courses at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá/Cali) and Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá). The 90-min intervention adapted Sheriff of Nottingham to an engineering entrepreneurship context and combined asymmetric roles, incentives, negotiation, uncertainty, consequences, and structured debriefing. Across 17 course offerings, 616 pre-intervention and 413 post-intervention questionnaires were analyzed as unmatched samples. In 2025-1, aggregate post-intervention scores were higher across all six measures (global score: 7.40 to 8.79), with the largest difference in academic integrity. In 2025-2, Rights (+6.9 percentage points) and Common Good (+6.1 pp) gained first-priority prominence, while the perceived role of ethics increased modestly. Qualitative responses after the intervention more often incorporated consequences, effects on others, professional responsibility, and individual–collective tensions. In 2025-2, 90.4% agreed or strongly agreed that the game helped them reflect differently on ethical dilemmas. These convergent patterns show early ethical sensitization and contextualization rather than stable ethical competence; the unmatched design, absence of a comparison group, and exploratory instruments preclude causal or individual-level claims.