Homo Ludens Moralis: Designing and Developing a Board Game to Teach Ethics for ICT Education

The ICT ethical landscape is changing at an astonishing rate, as technologies become more complex, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways, the resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is vitally important that the developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum; that they think about the uses and abuses of their creations, and take some measures to prevent others being harmed by their work. To equip these developers to rise to this challenge and to create a positive future for the use of technology, it important that ethics becomes a central element of the education of designers and developers of ICT systems and applications. To this end a number of third-level institutes across Europe are collaborating to develop educational content that is both based on pedagogically sound principles, and motivated by international exemplars of best practice. One specific development that is being undertaken is the creation of a series of ethics cards, which can be used as standalone educational prop, or as part of a board game to help ICT students learn about ethics.