How will they decide? A game-based approach to ethical thinking in the age of AI with Lacey Hilliard, Shelly London and Scot Osterweil
As AI becomes increasingly powerful, concerns are growing about how best to prepare students to think for themselves in an AI-mediated world. How do we help them become thinking, feeling, flourishing, and responsible citizens? How do we equip them for life’s quandaries without telling them what to think or do?
This episode will feature Quandary team members who have been thinking about, working on and researching these questions for more than a decade. Quandary, an award-winning, free online game and app played more than 2.5 million times, has been proven through independent research to cultivate important ethical decision-making skills, such as fact vs. opinion discernment, perspective-taking, reflection, and concern for others. The game, set on the fictional planet Braxos, is built around ethical dilemmas with no one right answer.
Recently, thanks to a Tools Competition EdTech prize, the team built and researched three game innovations designed for the AI age: a new episode focused on AI ethics; an Episode Builder to create your own dilemmas, characters and setting; and an in-game AI chatbot, designed to deepen reflection and learning. The Silver Lining for Learning conversation will focus on the team’s learnings and questions about preparing students for an even more complex world.
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Episode Guests
Lacey J. Hilliard, PhD
Lacey Hilliard is a developmental scientist and an associate professor in the Psychology Department at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. She studies how children learn about identity, fairness, and social issues. Her research focuses on how families, schools, and media shape children’s understanding of social groups, and how adults can better support children’s positive development. She also collaborates with educators, schools, and community organizations to create and evaluate educational media and tools to help children and adolescents navigate social challenges and ethical questions. She has worked as a researcher with the Quandary team on multiple projects, evaluating student learning and growth alongside game experience in middle schoolers, creating and evaluating supplemental materials for educators, and, recently, learning how newly developed Quandary innovations can foster ethical decision-making in high schoolers. Her work has been published in Child Development, Research in Human Development, Applied Developmental Science, and Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Shelly J. London
Shelly London, Quandary founder, is a retired senior corporate executive and foundation president emeritus, as well as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business since 2008, teaching ethics-related courses. She conceived of the idea for Quandary while a fellow in the 2009 inaugural cohort of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. She has spearheaded the creation of award-winning social impact initiatives that have been proven effective and supported millions, including The Family Dinner Project.org and the Webby-winning Understood.org, a comprehensive digital resource for parents of children with learning and thinking differences. In 2019, she received the Senator Robert Dole Humanitarian Award for service to people with disabilities. She serves on the advisory board of Making Caring Common at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and on the board of trustees of the American Ballet Theatre, America’s National Ballet Company®.
Scot Osterweil
Scot Osterweil is a research scientist in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and a Creative Consultant to the MIT Education Arcade and the MIT Game Lab. He has designed games in both academic and commercial environments. Designs include the acclaimed Zoombinis series (math and logic), Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medicine), and iCue (history). He is a founder, President, and Creative Director of Learning Games Network (www.learninggamesnetwork.org) where he led the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Language Learning Initiative (ESL), and where he designed Quandary, named Game of the Year at the 2013 Games for Change festival. He co-authored the book Resonant Games (MIT Press) and served as the play consultant on the Emmy Award winning Amazon TV series Tumbleleaf.