This course module, designed for use in a first-year programming course, gets students thinking about ethical issues that arise from the technology they will build. The module is on the topic of contract tracing, employed during pandemics and other disease outbreaks to limit the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19. The module includes pre-class, in-class, and post-class components. As students learn how a graph can represent contacts and consider the data that a contact tracing system might record, they are guided through an active learning exercise to discover an issue: Private information can sometimes be inferred from a contact tracing system. The ethical issue of balancing public health against individual privacy arises naturally from the technical discussion.
In the remainder of the module, students learn how to imagine and discuss the perspectives of different stakeholders on this ethical trade-off. For example, an overwhelmed acute care doctor has different priorities than someone with precarious employment and a chronic illness, who is afraid their private information might be leaked. Rather than trying to find the "right" answer, discussing these diverse viewpoints allows students to practice noticing and raising ethical questions and contemplating how different software design choices impact ethical issues---a skill that is critical to their work, whether as academic researchers or industry software developers. Students who complete this module learn that ethical considerations are a critical component of software design.
With only 50 minutes of in-class time and short pre- and post-class activities, this module packs a large impact into a short amount of time, whether as a stand-alone module or combined with the follow-up module, "Embedded Ethics: Pandemic Exposure Notification Systems and Giving Ethical Justifications" [6].
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- 2023. University of Toronto Embedded Ethics Module Repository. (2023). Retrieved 2023-11-10 from https://www.cs.toronto.edu/embedded-ethics/Google Scholar
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- Barbara J Grosz, David Gray Grant, Kate Vredenburgh, Jeff Behrends, Lily Hu, Alison Simmons, and Jim Waldo. 2019. Embedded EthiCS: integrating ethics across CS education. Commun. ACM 62, 8 (2019), 54--61.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Diane Horton, David Liu, Sheila A. McIlraith, and Nina Wang. 2023. Is More Better When Embedding Ethics in CS Courses?. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 652--658. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Diane Horton, Sheila A. McIlraith, Nina Wang, Maryam Majedi, Emma McClure, and Benjamin Wald. 2022. Embedding Ethics in Computer Science Courses: Does It Work?. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1 (SIGCSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 481--487. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maryam Majedi, Emma McClure, Benjamin Wald, Diane Horton, and Sheila McIlraith. 2023. Embedded Ethics: Pandemic Exposure Notification Systems and Giving Ethical Justifications. In ACM EngageCSEdu. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource. (2021). https://iep.utm.edu/Google Scholar
- 1000-Word Philosophy. 2021. 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. (2021). https://1000wordphilosophy.com/Google Scholar
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