Computational Thinking Between Philosophy and STEM - Programming Decision Making Applied to the Behavior of "Moral Machines" in Ethical Values Classroom

This paper describes a learning activity on computational thinking in ethics classroom with compulsory secondary school students (14–16 years old). It is based on the assumption that computational thinking (or better “logical thinking”) is applicable not only to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects but to any other field in education, and it is particularly suited for decision making in moral dilemmas. This will be carried out through the study of so called “moral machines,” using a game-based learning approach on self-driving vehicles and the need to program such cars to perform certain behavior’s under extreme situations. Students will be asked to logically base their reasoning on different ethical approaches and try to develop a schema of decision making that could serve to program a machine to respond to those situations. Students will also have to deal with the uncertainty of reaching solutions that will be debatable and not universally accepted as a part of the difficulty, more ethical than technical, to provide machines with the ability to take decisions where there is no such thing as a “right” versus “wrong” answer, and potentially both (or more) of the possible actions will bring unwanted consequences.

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