Wednesday, March 11th, 2020
1:30PM - 5:00PM
Portland, Oregon

Sign up here for the SIGCSE Pre-Symposium for Integrating Ethics and Social Responsibility in Computing Curricula.

Ethics and social responsibility has existed in computer science curricula for decades, and have become even more critical in recent years due to the many ways technology affects individuals and societies. This symposium aims to bring together those who are interested in integrating ethics and social responsibility into Computer Science curricula. The attendees will observe current lessons, and then discuss in breakout groups. The symposium will cover strategies for teaching ethics and how to incorporate ethics at multiple points throughout a computing curriculum. It also aims to build new collaborations across fields and across institutions, critical for doing this work.

During the symposium, four awardees from the Responsible Computer Science Challenge will showcase their lessons. The presenting educators were awarded grants for developing novel ways to integrate ethics into undergraduate computer science education. Learn more about the Challenge and awardees at http://responsiblecs.org, and sign up for the symposium here.

Please also register for SIGCSE. If you're only attending this Pre-Symposium, select the "Exhibit Only" option.

Presenting educators:

University at Buffalo, Atri Rudra, Matthew Hertz
The first part of the mock-class showcases activities from the undergraduate algorithms course related to high speed Internet access. The first activity would be an in-class exercise where students think about the technical and ethical issues related to increasing access to Internet in a Western New York county. Follow-up assignments include a video and coding project where students go through various routing problems related to working for a high speed Internet service provider. The remainder of the mock-class showcases an activity from the undergraduate capstone course. This activity has students think about the ethics of data and how they would respond in the workplace.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Helena Mentis
This presentation will focus on the benefits and challenges with peer-led integration of ethics into first year computing curriculum. Specifically we will present the "red teams" activity that engaged project teams in peer-critiques of another team's semester-long programming project. In this role-playing activity students were forced to think of themselves in responsible positions to vet and assess the suitability of a software system for a vulnerable population.

Miami Dade College, George Gabb
The objective of this activity is to introduce the role of ethics and social responsibility in technology and computing via a role-playing exercise that demonstrates to college students how new technology could impact the society. In this case, the role-playing activity simulates a city hall discussion about the adoption of facial recognition technology by a local police department. The activity was implemented at MDC in partnership with Microsoft, the Miami Police Department and local researchers in the topic.

Santa Clara University, Sukanya Manna
This initiative will help CS students learn to apply a deliberative ethical analysis framework that complements their technical learning. It will develop and test a variety of resources for software engineering, cybersecurity, and data analysis courses, including in-class activities, case studies, readings, and related projects. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University has long been a leader in developing and sharing such materials online; this initiative is developing new materials and actively integrating them into more courses.  This initiative will also develop a MOOC, synthesized from the work overall.

Learn more about the Challenge and sign up for the Global Community of Practice:
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/responsible-cs/community/

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