Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

This paper explores the cognitive and affective outcomes of the Sustainable Metrics (SusMet) Module for introducing engineering students to concepts of design for end-of-life and design for disassembly (explicit) and sustainable metrics (implicit) through active and experiential learning in the disassembly of green office chairs. The purpose of this research is to establish the impact of the SusMet module on student cognition and perceptions of sustainability and to understand the effect of activity on learning objective retention. The SusMet Module was implemented in a total of nine courses (318 total participants): eight freshman Introduction to Engineering and one junior Engineering Projects in Community Service course at Arizona State University. Research design included one course where students completed the entire module and one comparison course where the activity was removed; both courses included a follow-on design assignment two weeks after module implementation. The module was assessed using the mixed-methods approach of anonymous, digital pre- and postmodule surveys and a rubric to test the impact of activity on learning objective retention. The activity had the greatest impact on student cognition and retention of learning objectives; students that experienced hands-on disassembly of the chairs retained concepts students tended to struggle with, i.e., design for end-of-life (explicit) and sustainable metrics (implicit), to a greater degree than students in the $\mathrm{Intro}-\mathrm{Act}+\mathrm{Ret}$ course that did not experience hands-on chair disassembly. This research suggests that active, experiential learning could serve as a method to enhance sustainable engineering education through active exploration of sustainability concepts in conjunction with engineering designs.

Over the last century, colleges and universities in the United States have increasingly provided students with opportunities in the curriculum to choose the courses they take. Have engineering programs followed suit? This study explores the course-choice opportunities (e.g., free electives and technical electives) afforded to undergraduate engineering students versus their nonengineering campus peers. Using 2013–2014 university catalogs, course-choice opportunities for 553 degree programs across 46 engineering colleges were quantified, including 309 ABET-accredited engineering programs and 244 nonengineering programs. At the median, nonengineering undergraduates choose 23% of their degree programs as free (unrestricted) electives, versus only 3% for engineering students. Regarding the amount of total degree coursework that engineering students can choose as free electives, they could choose approximately one-fifth the amount compared with level of choice common in mathematics, physics and chemistry programs. Engineering students are typically provided choices in the selection of half as many courses as their nonengineering peers. It is hypothesized that the bleak course-choice opportunity in engineering programs is a barrier to enrollment, in-migration, and retention in undergraduate engineering. Eleven universities were identified that provide students with substantial course-choice opportunities and less course-choice peer disparity.

Service-learning courses at the university level provide a unique opportunity for students to learn about sustainability. The senior-level and graduate-level elective course Service-Learning for Water Treatment at the University of Mississippi’s (UM) School of Engineering combines educational and service activities on drinking water–treatment infrastructure for underprivileged communities. Students learn in person how to build and operate demonstration treatment systems and then test new prototype configurations. This course format allows engineering students to bring the evaluation of an infrastructure project to completion, apply sustainability principles, interact with a collaborating partner, and provide a real service. The three pillars of sustainability—environmental, social, and economic—are immediately apparent to students, who document their learning in reflection essay assignments during the semester. Essay assignments about sustainability are evaluated using open coding to assess students’ knowledge of the three pillars. It is apparent that through the service-learning experience, students were able to closely relate to all three pillars, especially the social pillar.

Mass customization (MC) aims to provide customized products to fulfill clients’ requirements while maintaining efficiencies similar to mass production. Although the goals of mass customization, high product variety and production efficiency, are clear, its implementation might not be obvious. Indeed, a number of enablers (solution space, modular architecture, and delayed product differentiation) are required for these seemingly conflicting goals to be attained. This paper proposes a live simulation game called the House Factory to fulfill this gap. This game aims to enhance the intuitive understanding of mass customization and how this concept can be applied in house building. Distinct production modes are simulated to illustrate the trade-off between product variety and production efficiency, and this is addressed in mass customization. This paper presents an initial application of the game as a teaching tool in an undergraduate course and also discusses the potential learning yield from it.