In-Class Ethics Bowl

As part of an effort to help students begin to think about ethical issues that come up in the course of research, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology developed a series of exercises for use in the university's interprofessional projects program. In this program, students from many different disciplines spend a semester working on a project with real world applications, such as designing a coffee storage facility for a small community in Uganda or working with a company to design more efficient way for shipping their products to customers. In this exercise, the students are divided into two groups and, by using the format of the ethics bowl, team members have the chance to compete in an hour-long competition where they debate questions about ethics case studies highlighting major ethical issues in their project.