Engineering Ethics, One Game at a Time
Games are great teaching tools, but can they help produce more ethical engineers? Scott Streiner, assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, is working to find out, one game at a time.
Streiner, with a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut, Rowan University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has received a cross-institutional $116,890 NSF grant to help develop and explore the role of games in ethics education. The project, “Collaborative Research: Using Digital Narratives and Data Analytics to Enhance Ethical Judgment Education and Assessment,” will use large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) to assess student responses and help scale data-informed, game-based ethics education in engineering.
“Too often ethics are taught abstractly in engineering courses. Students will have a module on ethics, complete some readings and an activity, and then get assessed. Possibly they will do a pre-post assessment using some sort of ethical instrument,” said Streiner, who is also part of the Swanson School’s Engineering Education Research Center.
“This grant seeks to make ethics education more engaging, more holistically woven into the material, and more data-driven,” Steiner added.
The project builds off the team’s earlier NSF research in which they developed and used three games to teach ethics in undergraduate engineering courses: Cards Against Engineering Ethics, a card-based game modeled on Cards Against Humanity; Toxic Workplaces, a scenario-based game inspired by TV game show Family Feud; and Mars: An Ethical Expedition, an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure game.
Mars: An Ethical Expedition, developed at the University of Connecticut, presents a narrative where students play the roles of different engineers colonizing Mars. Originally static and led by an instructor, the game has been automated and can be used by teams of students or individuals over a 12-week period. During play, students face ethical dilemmas as they build their society on Mars, and each choice leads to a different outcome or new ethical dilemma.
“We're interested in how context and situation impact decisions,” said Streiner. “We'll continue to develop this game and use the data to train large language models and natural language process to assess the game play.”
Central to the game is stealth assessment. While teaching students about ethical decision making and behaviors as well as ethical dilemmas, instructors can assess their students’ reasoning without the participants knowledge.
“One of the advantages of this game, especially with ethics, is that many students are afraid of saying the wrong thing or feeling that they're going to be judged when they are responding to a certain scenario, especially in the class discussions,” Streiner said.
“It’s easy to make the right decision when you know the outcome in advance. It's harder when you don't. That’s what this game shows.”
By making Mars: An Ethical Expedition readily available and developing a repository of data, the team will learn more about student decision making and the ethical context. What are the normal pathways through the game? What's the most likely path given a certain scenario, and how are students differing in these situations? How do decisions change over time?
Answering questions like these, the team seeks to improve ethics education and better prepare students to make ethical decisions.
“When engineers leave college and enter the workforce, they eventually will face ethical dilemmas, and the consequences of making a wrong choice can be incredibly costly,” said Streiner. “Game play engages students to wrestle with the complexity and the possible consequences of ethical lapses using a familiar, fun medium. With this grant, we hope we’ll get more engineering students to click the button to start a new game.”