2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

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.

Authors

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

Tori Wagner is a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut studying Learning Sciences. She has a background in secondary science education, playful learning, and digital game design.

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