Future Learning Initiative - FLI
ETH’s Chair of Learning Sciences and the ETH’s Chair of Bioethics have collaborated as part of the Future Learning Initiative. This project aims to improve ethics education at ETH by designing innovative educational activities and technologies. In particular, the project explores the affordances of game and play-based educational experiences in ethics education.
Further, the project will contribute research for ethics pedagogy. To that end, we are establishing an extensive research program to develop and test much-needed design principles for ethics education and the consequent evidence-based creation of an educational ethics game.
Two overarching questions guide the design of this project:
- How are ethics teaching and learning different/comparable to teaching and learning other subjects?
Over the course of this project we will test a variety of educational designs that are well established in other subjects for ethics education courses and activities - How can ethics education in the higher education STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) disciplines be made more impactful?
We are particularly interested in educational designs that help students transfer what they learn in an ethics course to other courses and to their professional practice and research activity after they graduate. In particular, we aim to explore and test the affordances of state of the art educational technologies and gamification elements.
Project Link:
https://www.fli.ethz.ch/ethics-education/
Project Team:
Felix Gille
Joanna Sleigh
Effy Vayena
Project Partner:
D-GESS
Peer-reviewed publications
Gille, F., Nardo, A. (2020). A Case for Transformative Learning in Medical Ethics Education. Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development. external page https://doi.org/10.1177/2382120520931059
Nardo, A., Gaydos, M. (2021). ‘Wicked problems’ as catalysts for learning in educational ethics games. In Ethics and Education 16(4), (p. 492-509).
Conference talks and proceedings:
Gaydos, M., Nardo, A. (under review). Towards a Theory of Dialogic Play. ICLS 2022, short paper.
Gaydos, M., Nardo, A., Write or Wrong: A Transformational Game for Ethics Education, 22-25 April 2022, AERA 2022, oral presentation.
Gaydos, M., Nardo, A., Towards a theory of transformational ethical gameplay, 17 Nov 2020, ECGBL 2020 – Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Game Based Learning. Curran Associates Inc, p. 805-807 (European Conference on Games-Based Learning).
Nardo, A., Gaydos, M., Designing an Educational Ethics Game, 2 July 2020, Ludicious Zurich Game Festival.
Educational ethics game: Write of Wrong
Write or Wrong offers educators a unique way of introducing complex topics such as academic integrity and responsible conduct of research through interactive gaming experience which allows players to practice dealing with difficult decisions under time constraints typical of real life situations experienced by academics across disciplines who have heavy workloads balancing teaching responsibilities with conducting research and publishing results thereof. It also teaches students valuable skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and communication which are essential when working collaboratively on any project - regardless if its academic paper or software development project - thus helping them become better professionals equipped with knowledge necessary for success in today's competitive job market.