Teaching Ethics by Teaching Ethics Pedagogy: A Proposal for Structural Ethics Intervention

We report on a reformulated general Ethics and Robotics course, in which we aim to address the twin curricular challenges of exposing computer science students to ethics discourse and establishing a pathway for ethics-oriented modules to be designed into numerous computer science courses across an institution. Given computer science instructors' lack of time and expertise to build ethics modules themselves, we tasked our students with creating ethics modules for instructors of 11 computer science courses at our university. Our course participants represented a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives that catalyzed lively discussions and creative ideas for ethics pedagogy innovation. We report on course details, including in-class activities, assignments, and the project. We discuss our findings, including reception from students and computer science instructors and planned updates for the next course iteration. Given the course's overall success, we share with the hope that others may learn from or adopt our course approach. Materials are available on our website: https://vdean.github.io/16-735-ethics-robotics.html.