The past twenty years have seen the blossoming of ethics education in undergraduate engineering programs, largely as a response to the large-scale and high-impact engineering disasters that have occurred since the turn of the century. The functional form of this education differs significantly among institutions, and in recent years active learning that demonstrates a strong impact on students’ retention and synthesis of new material have taken hold as the preferred educational methodology. Among active learning strategies, gamified or playful learning has grown in popularity, with substantial evidence indicating that games can increase student participation and social interaction with their classmates and with the subject matter.
A key goal of engineering ethics education is for students to learn how to identify, frame, and resolve ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas occur naturally in social situations, in which an individual must reconcile opposing priorities and viewpoints. Thus, it seems natural that as a part of their ethics education, students should discuss contextualized engineering ethical situations with their peers. How these discussions play out, and the manner in which students (particularly first-year engineering students) address and resolve ethical dilemmas in a group setting is the main topic of this research paper.
In this study, first-year engineering students from three universities across the northeastern USA participated in group discussions involving engineering ethical scenarios derived from the Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI) and Toxic Workplaces: A Cooperative Ethics Card Game (a game developed by the researchers). Questions were posed to the student groups, which center upon concepts such as integrity, conflicting obligations, and the contextual nature of ethical decision making. An a priori coding schema based on these concepts was applied to analyze the student responses, based upon earlier iterations of this procedure performed in previous years of the study.
The primary results from this research will aim to provide some insight about first-year engineering students' mindsets when identifying, framing, and resolving ethical dilemmas. This information can inform ethics education design and development strategies. Furthermore, the experimental procedure is also designed to provide a curated series of ethical engineering scenarios with accompanying discussion questions that could be adopted in any first-year classroom for instructional and evaluative purposes.
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Work in Progress: Toxic Workplaces: Game-Based Exploration of Engineering Ethics for First-Year Engineering Students
This Work-in-Progress paper stems from an NSF-sponsored project in which a series of game- based activities have been developed for the purpose of enhancing instruction in engineering ethics. These activities have been integrated into first year engineering courses on several campuses. One of these activities is called Toxic Workplaces. In gameplay, the students are presented with scenarios that involve ethical dilemmas. Each scenario comes with several possible responses. The game involves the student/player attempting to rank these possible responses in order of popularity. Thus, players do not necessarily need to take a position on what they themselves would do, but rather are attempting to match the results of survey data that was collected previously.
In the Fall of 2022, a team of eight undergraduate students completed a project in which they developed new scenarios, greatly expanding the range of options available to an instructor who wishes to incorporate Toxic Workplaces into a course. This paper describes the game itself and its motivation, and discusses the process by which the undergraduate student team generated and refined their new scenarios.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1934707
- PAR ID:
- 10494795
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Peer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 1524-4644
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Ethics Games Gamification
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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