Using Role-Play to Scale the Integration of Ethics Across the Computer Science Curriculum

Abstract

In response to widespread calls for computer scientists to better engage with the ethical dimensions of their work, there has been a surge of interest to embed ethics across the computer science (CS) curriculum. Yet one key set of barriers to doing so can be broadly described as scaling challenges -- in the number and breadth of courses in a curriculum and in the number of students in the CS major. Our paper describes and makes available a novel activity for teaching ethics using role-play that has advantages for scaling across different courses and in different delivery modes, including synchronous and asynchronous online course offerings. We describe our design process and early findings from developing the activity in a large first year seminar course, a senior-level computing and society class, and three different online graduate level courses. Further, we describe an evaluation survey that instructors can use to assess the short-term impact of the activity. We analyze survey results and our direct observations to reflect on the strengths and challenges of the activity. Our experiences suggest that role-play as a pedagogical tool can be particularly useful to broaden student perspectives and meaningfully incorporate ethics into CS courses.