Traditional classroom participation often privileges visible verbal contributions, overlooking the many other ways students meaningfully engage with course content, peers, and instructors. As such, we introduce the Participation Passport, a low-stakes reflection tool designed to broaden how participation is recognized by encouraging students to identify and reflect on diverse forms of engagement after each class session. Grounded in principles of Universal Design for Learning and informed by student perspectives, the tool reframes participation as a multimodal, student-centered process that supports metacognition while providing instructors with greater insight into classroom engagement.

The Participation Passport was implemented across first-year design-build courses to explore how structured reflection legitimizes less visible forms of participation. Findings suggest that the tool helped uncover a wider range of meaningful participation practices, broadened how participation was understood by both students and instructors, and encouraged metacognitive reflection and growth. By shifting participation from the traditional, narrow measure of classroom speaking toward a broader understanding of engagement practices, the Participation Passport offers a practical framework for fostering more equitable, reflective, and collaborative learning communities.

Engineering documentation is a critical professional skill, yet undergraduate students often perceive it as a low-value, product-oriented task rather than an integral part of the design process. This disconnect contributes to a preparedness gap between academic training and industry expectations, where clear and reproducible records are essential. Here, we introduce Recreate, a two-stage classroom activity that shifts student perceptions of documentation through productive failure and leads them toward identifying professional documentation standards.

In Stage 1, students attempt to replicate an artifact using intentionally flawed documentation, leading to failure and exposing limitations in their existing practices. Through guided reflection, students identify these shortcomings and develop criteria for high-quality documentation. In Stage 2, they receive documentation where these criteria are applied, leading to the successful completion of a similar task due to this improved documentation.

The activity was implemented in early engineering design courses and assessed using a mixed-methods, pre-post design. Results show a modest increase in students’ perceived utility of engineering notebooks and a clear shift toward audience-aware, process-oriented documentation practices emphasizing clarity and reproducibility. These findings suggest that Recreate is an effective and scalable approach for introducing professional documentation standards in early engineering education.

Ethics education in cybersecurity often fails to move students beyond simplistic “black hat vs. white hat” distinctions toward nuanced professional reasoning. This paper introduces Jury Duty, an interactive mock-jury activity designed to provide early-career students with a structured ethical framework for analyzing ambiguous cybersecurity scenarios. Grounded in experiential learning, the activity engages students in collaborative deliberation using a five-point framework (authorization, intent, methods, disclosure, and legality), followed by individual reflection.

Across multiple implementations of Jury Duty, students demonstrated a shift from intuitive judgments to structured ethical reasoning, increasingly using professional terminology and articulating decisions across competing ethical and legal dimensions. Students also showed evidence of independent moral agency, frequently maintaining positions that diverged from group consensus while justifying their reasoning.

By transforming ethics instruction into an active, participatory process, Jury Duty helps students reconceptualize cybersecurity as a disciplined professional practice grounded in accountability and ethical responsibility.

This conference proceeding presents the development of a beginner-friendly cybersecurity course created and taught by students, for students, at UC Santa Cruz. The course uses experiential learning, hands-on activities, and a custom Capture the Flag (CTF) platform to introduce foundational topics such as Linux, digital forensics, web hacking, and technical documentation. Offered through the Jack Baskin School of Engineering's First Year Design program, the course is structured to support students with no prior experience and emphasizes collaboration, design thinking, and real-world application. Findings from three offerings show increased student engagement, confidence, and skill growth, demonstrating the effectiveness of peer instruction and structured experiential learning, as well as success in introducing complex topics to the early-career, lower-division population.