Board 399: The Affordances of Playful Learning in Ethics Education: Challenging the Status Quo

Abstract Ethics education has been recognized as increasingly important to engineering over the past two decades, although disagreement exists concerning how ethics can and should be taught in the classroom. With the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, a collaboration of investigators from the University of Connecticut, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, and Rowan University are conducting a mixed-methods project investigating how game-based or playful learning with strongly situated components can influence first-year engineering students' ethical knowledge, awareness, and decision making. The popularity and prevalence of game-based or "playful" learning strategies has grown significantly over the past two decades, finding applications in a diverse range of educational contexts. Playful learning offers unique affordances for the practical assessment of ethics learning outcomes. Current ethical assessments often place undue emphasis on the categorization of knowledge and skills, while not sufficiently addressing the process through which students navigate and act on ethical dilemmas. This, we posit, is an area that needs redefining, given that ethical decision-making is rarely a linear process with single objective "right" answers and often involves iterative reasoning and interactive engagement with the problem. As such, we have developed a suite of ethics-driven classroom games that have been implemented and evaluated across three universities, engaging over 400 first-year engineering students over the past 3 years. Now in the grant's final year, we are finishing the design of two of the game-based ethics interventions to (1) more accurately align with the ethical dilemmas in the Engineering Ethics Reasoning Instrument (EERI), (2) allow for more flexibility in modality of how the games are distributed to faculty and students, and (3) provide more variety in terms of the contexts of ethical dilemmas as well as types of dilemmas. In this paper, we will summarize our findings to date, address the application of playful learning to engineering ethics education, and review some key challenges to successful implementation of playful learning. We assert that playful learning environments can afford the assessment of ethical decision making as a first-person interaction and engagement with dynamic information in the world. Challenging the status quo and redefining the teaching and learning of engineering ethics will open up a plethora of new research opportunities and should prompt a deeper, more critical engagement with the development of ethical engineers.