2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Across technology, design, and engineering fields, growing concerns over societal and
environmental impacts are prompting critical interrogations of established and often uncontested
methods and frameworks at the core of computing, engineering, and design practices (see for
example [1, 2, 3, 4]). Engineering education increasingly emphasizes preparing students to
address complex global and ethical challenges [5], as reflected in accreditation expectations [6]
and longstanding calls for professional responsibility [7, 8, 9]. Rapid technological advances have
further intensified ethical concerns, prompting the need for instructional approaches that support
ethical reasoning in engineering contexts [10, 11]. Student writing has been proposed as an
approach to ethics instruction, as it supports idea development [12], specificity of reasoning [13],
and anticipation of ethical implications. However, students’ limited writing skills and the
marginalization of language instruction in technical curricula present persistent challenges
[14, 15]. Recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) offer a potential
scaffolding mechanism by supporting content development and argument construction, thereby
reducing writing-related barriers while enabling clearer demonstrations of ethical reasoning. With
better writing supports, students could more clearly communicate and show their consideration of
the impacts of engineered solutions (e.g., identifying relevant contextual factors [16, 17],
analyzing case studies of solution impacts related to design decisions [18]). Speculative fiction
writing is particularly well suited to ethics instruction, as it helps students to imagine plausible
future technologies and reason about their social and ethical consequences beyond present-day
constraints [19]. This study examines how writing assignments supported by GenAI scaffolds
shape students’ ethical reasoning in an undergraduate technology ethics course. Student
speculative fiction artifacts were analyzed through justice-oriented and care-oriented ethical
lenses, which capture complementary forms of ethical reasoning commonly emphasized in
engineering ethics education. Using pilot data, this work explores how GenAI may support
students’ writing fluency while making ethical reasoning more visible. Our results show that
GenAI use significantly reduced time spent on writing assignments, and that structured GenAI
guidance increased the variety of both justice and care-oriented ethical principles expressed in
student writing. Our findings contribute to the emerging pedagogical approaches for ethics
education in engineering and computing.