(312a) A ‘Cards Against Humanity’-Style Card Game for Increasing Engineering Students Awareness of Ethical Issues in the Profession

Across all engineering disciplines, engineering design solutions frequently have major, long-lasting impacts on societal development. Since the process of technical innovation occurs in increasingly complex social exchanges, engineers are frequently confronted with social and ethical dilemmas in their professional lives. Yet, many engineering curricula do not incorporate these issues in formal ways into engineering education. Many widely publicized failures of complex engineering systems can be traced back to lapses in judgment on either ethical or societal impact axes, including the Volkswagen Diesel Engine scandal, the BP Gulf Oil Spill, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, and recently, the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis.

In this work, we explore the application of game-based and game-inspired learning in an engineering education setting. Giving students the opportunity during their education to recognize the wider social and ethical impacts of the profession - through multimedia simulation, role-playing games, case-based learning, and review of other, fictionalized cases - can give them opportunities to reflect on the need to identify complex situations in future settings, as well as a safe environment in which to explore, make mistakes, and discuss the ramifications of various decisions in authentic contexts. Ultimately the goal is to better prepare young engineers to tackle ethically the current and future challenges that have tended to be underemphasized in traditional engineering curriculums.

In this particular application, we have developed a beta version of a ‘Cards Against Humanity’ (CAH)-type card game focused on ethical, societal, and social questions within an engineering context. For those not familiar with the ‘Cards Against Humanity’ game model, a group of players each draws a number of ‘response cards’ (White Cards). One player then draws a Black Card, which contains a question, situation, or fill-in-the-blank. The other players look at all of the potential responses they have in their hand (the White Cards), and attempt to make the best response out of the combination of the Black Card and their White Card. The player who read the Black Card judges all of the other player responses, makes a selection of the winning condition (in Cards against Humanity, this is usually the ‘funniest’ response combination), awards points, and then play continues with a different player drawing another Black Card and reading another scenario.

The CAH model has been adapted previously in other educational settings. [refs] As discussion of ethical, societal, or social scenarios could prove to be controversial, using a game-based approach may allow participants to engage in discussion of the topics and concepts in a more playful, abstract manner, allowing freer responses and more meaningful exploration of the topics, as they are safely confined within a game construct.

The white card and black card prompts are responses are currently being crowd-sourced via a diverse group of engineering faculty, education faculty, and engineering students. In the Spring 2017 semester, the game will be beta-tested with select groups of engineering students. Results of this play testing and lessons learned will be discussed.