2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Collective vs. Individual Decision-Making in an Engineering Ethics Narrative Game

Presented at Decision-Making in Engineering Ethics Education

Fostering ethical decision-making skills in undergraduate engineering students is central to ABET accreditation and crucial to student engineers’ success in future careers [1]. This ongoing research focuses on the development of a narrative game called Mars: An Ethical Expedition (Mars) [2]. The game draws on the contemporary learning theory of situated cognition to provide students with a situated, contextualized, and playful platform for using and reflecting on their ethical reasoning abilities [3, 4]. The game aims to be an engaging and immersive tool for the development of engineering ethics in the narrative setting of realistic decision-making. Our work to-date suggests that existing tools for assessing engineering ethical decision-making such as the EERI may not be sensitive to the applied, situated, contextually rich first-person decision-making in games like Mars [5].

In this work, we compared two primary methods for the implementation of the Mars game: individual play and whole-class play. By developing and studying both options, we seek to understand how personalized versus collective decision-making impacts ethical reasoning. The individual mode allows students to navigate through the game independently, making choices that reflect their personal ethical considerations. In contrast, the whole-class play mode encourages collaborative deliberation, enabling students to engage in group discussions and vote on decisions that mimic real-world engineering teamwork.

In the future, we plan to incorporate explanatory responses for each decision students make. These explanations not only encourage reflection and deeper engagement with ethical dilemmas but also serve as valuable pedagogical tools for instructors and facilitators. The integration of explanatory responses aims to promote a more comprehensive understanding of the ethical considerations underlying students' choices. To assess and provide feedback on the quality of students' ethical reasoning, we intend to employ text classification techniques. These techniques will enable us to analyze student responses and categorize them as either using ethical reasoning or lacking it, based on a predefined scoring rubric. This approach will help us understand the effectiveness of the game in promoting ethical decision-making skills.

Authors

Ms. Tori N. Wagner University of Connecticut [biography]

Tori Wagner is a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut studying Engineering Education. She has a background in secondary science education, playful learning, and digital game design.
Dr. Daniel D. Burkey University of Connecticut [biography]

Daniel Burkey is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs and the Castleman Term Professor in Engineering Innovation in the College of Engineering at the University of Connecticut. He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University in 1998, his M.S.C.E.P and Ph.D., both in Chemical Engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 an 2003, respectively, and his M.A.Ed with a focus in Research Methods, Measurement, and Evaluation from the University of Connecticut in 2023.
Dr. Richard Tyler Cimino http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-4171-4133 New Jersey Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Richard T. Cimino is a Senior Lecturer in the Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research interests include the intersection of engineering ethics and process safety, and broadening inclusion in engineering, with a focus on the LGBTQ+ community.
Dr. Scott Streiner University of Pittsburgh [biography]

Scott Streiner is an Assistant Professor in the Industrial Engineering Department, teaches in the First-Year Engineering Program and works in the Engineering Education Research Center (EERC) in the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Scott has received funding through NSF to conduct research on the impact of game-based learning on the development of first-year students’ ethical reasoning, as well as research on the development of culturally responsive ethics education in global contexts. He is an active member of the Kern Engineering Entrepreneurship Network (KEEN), the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE)
Dr. Kevin D. Dahm Rowan University [biography]

Kevin Dahm is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Rowan University. He earned his BS from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (92) and his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (98). He has published two books, "Fundamentals of Chemical Engineer
Dr. Jennifer Pascal University of Connecticut [biography]

Jennifer Pascal is an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut. She earned her PhD from Tennessee Technological University in 2011 and was then an NIH Academic Science Education and Research Training (ASERT) Postdoctoral Fellow at

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