Work in Progress: Toxic Workplaces: Game-Based Exploration of Engineering Ethics for First-Year Engineering Students

This Work-in-Progress paper stems from an NSF-sponsored project in which a series of game-based activities have been developed for the purpose of enhancing instruction in engineering ethics. These activities have been integrated into first year engineering courses on several campuses. One of these activities is called Toxic Workplaces. In gameplay, the students are presented with scenarios that involve ethical dilemmas. Each scenario comes with several possible responses. The game involves the student/player attempting to rank these possible responses in order of popularity. Thus, players do not necessarily need to take a position on what they themselves would do, but rather are attempting to match the results of survey data that was collected previously. In the Fall of 2022, a team of eight undergraduate students completed a project in which they developed new scenarios, greatly expanding the range of options available to an instructor who wishes to incorporate Toxic Workplaces into a course. This paper describes the game itself and its motivation, and discusses the process by which the undergraduate student team generated and refined their new scenarios.