Since the 1990s, amid the trend toward the internationalization of engineering qualifications, engineering ethics, which originated in the United States, has come to be recognized as an essential component of engineering education in Japan. Due to The Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) makes engineer ethics education an essential subject, almost University engineering departments and technical college in Japan began to educate engineering ethics.

However, preceding studies on engineering ethics education in Japan have mainly focused on the educator’s perspective. Teaching is a "complex activity involving diverse values and factors" and "an interaction that students develop with others over the content of the subject matter". In this sense, educational research in engineering ethics requires not only curriculum development using pre- and post-questionnaires to students, but also observing and describing how teachers and students act and discuss during class, how teachers teach, and how students acquire knowledge. Therefore, this study focuses on the interaction and learning process between teacher and students in an engineering ethics class, using discourse analysis and video review.

In our research, we conducted a trial class, recorded the group work on video, described the teacher's and student’s discourse, behavior, and actions, and reviewed the class.　As a result, we found that students not only completed the assigned tasks, but also constructed better arguments, dynamically adjusting and integrating their knowledge through discussions. We concluded that discourse analysis and video review were effective means of analyzing and improving this learning process.

Furthermore, based on the results of these analyses, our research project will work on the development of new engineering ethics education materials. Since last year we have been trying to make learning materials with our students in our environmental studies classes. In this endeavor we have incorporated the Serious Board Game Jam. SBGJ is a combination of three words: serious game, meaning to think about social issues, board game, and game jam, meaning to make a game together. The term was named by Kazuhiko Ota, an associate professor at Nanzan University in Japan. After teaching basic knowledge in an environmental studies class, students worked in groups over several sessions to create games to think about the environment. This presentation will also report on the current status and challenges of developing teaching materials.