Abstract

Dr Nardo explores the potential of digital games to teach ethics in the context of higher education. Drawing from her own experience of creating an educational ethics computer game, she discusses some of the problems arising from applying existing theoretical frameworks for educational games to the domain of ethics education. Dr Nardo contends that usual design frameworks for educational games are incongruous with the inherent ‘wickedness’ of ethical problems – viz., their inconclusive, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature. For example, educational games are often focused on learning through consequentiality and consistent game-system feedback to players’ actions, both of which are complicated in the case of ethics education. In her talk, Dr Nardo introduces an alternative framework for the design of educational ethics games grounded in her own research that negates established design principles and re-examines what ‘ethics education’ is.

Bio: Aline Nardo is Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Edinburgh and former Fulbright scholar. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Jesus College Cambridge. She has published on the works of John Dewey and Lev S. Vygotsky, the intersection of theories of evolution and educational theory, and ethics education.

Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science, and the Public Seminar