Shades of Grey 2.0: Educational Gaming for Ethics

Abstract

The Shades of Grey education game is a team-based game that students play in a class lecturers to easily add gaming elements to their lessons. Shades of Grey is used as a mechanism to encourage the student discussion and debate of the ethical issues raised in a series of ethically challenging situations. It is expected that this will increase student engagement with the subject matter and participation in discussion.

Since the initial development and testing of the Shades of Grey game (SoG) prototype in 2010 there has been significant change in the availability and capability of mobile devices in the classroom. More students are equipped with smart mobile devices, wireless networking technology is improving and technologies such as HTML5 are helping to improve cross platform internet experiences. With these changes in mind, the Shades of Grey research team have sought an internal research grant to fund the re-development of the game to make use of the mobile devices that students bring with them and to make it easier for teaching staff to customise the game for their own needs.

An enhanced second version of the game has been developed and to date has been trialled in an advanced auditing course in semester two 2014. Students who played the game were given the opportunity to participate in the study of SoG by completing a questionnaire. Findings from the questionnaire were used to uncover the perceptions of students towards the game which were overwhelmingly positive. These perceptions will be used in conjunction with the facilitator's observations to inform future development and the potential for its continued use in the programme and beyond. This presentation reports on those findings and the future of the Shades of Grey education game.