The teaching modules were designed considering the key elements of the competition platform and principles of value-sensitive design. The competition platform includes a clear scene-setting (e.g., an apartment), a list of key personas, a description of the robot's capability (i.e., to fetch an object when commanded to), and the simulation interface for designing the robot's path. The design of the modules was modeled after the “Value Sensitive Design in Higher Education (VASE)” curriculum which includes a range of teaching activities under the pillars of Ethics and Values, Designers and Stakeholders, and Technology and Design. When designing the teaching modules, we considered the task framed in the roboethics challenge— developing an appropriate ethical policy for the robot in the given scenario—as the main design challenge. Subsequently, three teaching modules (TM) were developed to 1) identify needs and design objectives, 2) brainstorm potential solutions, and 3) evaluate and select.
One of the key elements in understanding the ethical and social implications of technology is to understand the perspectives and needs of the people impacted. The learning activities of this module
are: i) identify direct and indirect stakeholders, ii) map out stakeholder's values and potential value tensions, and iii) translate value and value tensions to design objectives.
In TM-1, students are first introduced to the concepts of stakeholders, values, value tensions, and design objectives, before engaging with their learning activity. Once these concepts have been introduced,
the students take part in an activity to apply these concepts (60-90 minutes). The activity starts with students taking some time to familiarize themselves with the scenario and the simulation platform (10-20 min).
From there, the students will be asked to identify key stakeholders, the values that are of importance to them in the given scenario and examine the benefits and harms that they could experience (25-35min).
Moreover, the activity probes the students to identify potential value tensions within an individual or between stakeholders. The last part of this activity (25-35min) is to develop a list of design objectives that
correspond to and could address the identified value tensions.
In this module, we focus on the brainstorming and implementation of a decision-making strategy that could satisfy the design objectives identified in TM-1.
The learning activities for this module are: i) brainstorm potential decision-making strategies, ii) select an ethical decision-making strategy considering the design objectives,
and iii) implement the strategy on the simulation platform. This teaching module (TM-2) is designed to be 80-120 minutes long.
There are three key activities in this module. The first activity (20-30 min) starts with a brainstorming of potential decision-making strategies for the robot.
The students are first guided to develop a list of ethically problematic scenarios by considering various permutations of the object being fetched, who is receiving the object,
and who the fetch request is coming from. After identifying a set of problematic scenarios, students are then asked to brainstorm potential decision-making strategies that could
resolve one or more of the problematic scenarios. At this point, the students are asked to ideate as many potential solutions as possible and refrain from early judgment.
In the second activity (20-30 min), the students pick at least one potential solution to be prototyped on the simulation platform (Figure 3).
To pick a solution, they will reflect on the design objectives they outlined at the end of TM-1 and examine which one of their solutions is most likely to align with these objectives.
The emphasis is not to pick the best solution at this stage but rather to think through the alignment between the design objectives (identified in TM-1) and the potential design choices.
The last activity for this module (40-60 min) is to implement one or more of the selected solutions. The goal of this activity is to motivate the students to think through how their
solution could be implemented. This naturally forces students to consider the challenges of translating theoretical ideas into practical/implementable designs. The duration of this
last activity can vary depending on the delivery modality (paper-based vs. software). Students interested in using the simulation platform (software), and their affinity to develop
program skills as part of the experience could be given more time to become familiar with the software platform.
The focus of this module is to systematically evaluate the various proposed solutions. Evaluation is a critical step in designing and developing any technological system.
Often the choice of evaluation methods and metrics determines which final design choices a system is deployed with. When it comes to evaluating the proposed solutions within the roboethics context,
it is important to have evaluation criteria that look beyond performance-related measures such as efficiency in the robot's response time. The learning activities of this module are: i) develop evaluation criteria,
ii) assess a solution concerning each criterion, and iii) discuss the pros and cons of each of the solutions. The teaching module is designed to take 60-90 minutes.
In the first activity of TM-3 (20-30 min), the students are asked to review the design objectives and convert them to evaluation criteria by framing the objectives as questions. For example,
a question for the design objective of safety would be: how well does the robot recognize potentially unsafe objects for a specific fetch request? Evaluation criteria need to be specific and
granular while design objectives may sometimes be broad or abstract. In addition to the evaluation criteria from the design objectives, students are asked to consider two other criteria:
1) generalizability: how generalizable is this solution for other personas, objects, and places? and 2) implementation: how easy was it to implement the proposed solution on the simulation platform?
In the second activity (20-30 min), students need to think through each of the selected solutions and think about how they perform against the evaluation criteria. Recognizing that students
might not be able to assign a number for all criteria, students are encouraged to outline the pros and cons of each solution for each criterion.
To conclude this module, the last activity (20-30 min) focuses on comparing the different solutions across all the evaluation criteria. The students are encouraged to discuss the pros and
cons and to conclude on the solution that best meets all the criteria.