Comet 3.0

Project introduction and background information

Our goal for this two-year project was to turn the theoretical insights from COMET 1.0 into several concrete experiential exercises, in a manner similar to the exercise developed in COMET 2.0. In doing so, we worked towards an Engineering Ethics Education (EEE) Ecosystem with teachers and students. By combining fundamental and qualitative research, we further developed the Experiential Engineering Ethics Framework. We began developing this theoretical framework in Comet 2.0, with a foundational paper on moral imagination and the accompanying tinkering exercise. In Comet 3.0, we developed this framework by designing 4 specific educational exercises, using insights from the latest research in 4E cognition and educational sciences, and we worked toward implementing our educational insights into an educational ecosystem, by developing a workshop with engineering educators to see what their needs are for further embedding ethics in the learning lines. 

Team members: Aafke Fraaije, Andrea Gammon, Martin Sand, Steffen Steinert - workpackage leads
Project leads:  Lavinia Marin & Janna van Grunsven

Objective and expected outcomes

During the two-year project period, we achieved our dual objectives:

1. Practical-Educational Advancement: We designed and tested four concrete experiential exercises grounded in our novel theoretical framework. These exercises implemented principles of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition (4E Cognition) to make ethics come alive as a pervasive feature of engineering practice. Each exercise targeted specific moral competencies, including anticipation, moral imagination, moral sensitivity, and empathy, while avoiding the superficiality common in traditional case-based approaches.

2. Institutional Ecosystem Development: We established mechanisms for integrating experiential ethics teaching into TU Delft's engineering curricula through our "Teach the Teachers" initiative. By providing engineering faculty with practical tools, frameworks, and support, we created pathways for ethics to become responsive to disciplinary needs while maintaining theoretical rigor. This work represented the foundational step toward building a comprehensive ecosystem for learning and teaching engineering ethics.

The project answered our central research question: How do we develop experiential exercises that are genuinely effective, capable of making ethics come alive as a pervasive feature of the world of engineering? Through systematic development, testing, and refinement across diverse educational contexts, we showed as a proof of concept that experiential methods grounded in 4E cognition have a real potential to cultivate soft moral skills for engineering students.

Results and learnings

The project delivered all planned outcomes organized across two primary work packages:

Work Package 3: Exercise Building

Objective Achieved: Development of four fully documented experiential ethics teaching exercises with step-by-step instructions, deployment reports, and guidelines for implementation.

Outcomes Delivered:

WP3a - Science Fiction Narrative Mapping Exercise (Lead: Lavinia Marin)

• Developed and tested an exercise using science fiction story-writing to foster anticipation and moral imagination
• Deployed in two contexts: master's students and engineering educators
• Published as open educational resource with DOI: 10.48544/eee79e8a-5456-403d-9e5d-fba2f9686f72, The Sci-Fi storytelling mapping exercise starting from writing prompts (group work)

WP3b - Responsible Anticipation and Visioneering Exercise (Lead: Martin Sand)

• A structured activity for critical analysis of technological visions and development of responsible socio-technical futures
• Tested with diverse technological scenarios (AI weapons, VR futures, space tourism, healthcare innovations) in three courses across several iterations (PhD methods course at TPM, Environmental ethics course -master's level, and the Sci-Fi course - master's elective)
• Published  online at edusources.nl

WP3c - Caring at Distance Exercise (Lead: Andrea Gammon)

• Designed a two-session workshop on exploring engineers' responsibility toward distant others in climate engineering contexts
• Was deployed two times in the environmental ethics course (master's level)
• Integrated critical ecofeminism and political theory into engineering education
• The exercise description and outcomes documented in forthcoming book chapter

WP3d - Collage-Making for Self-Discovery Exercise (Lead: Aafke Fraaije)

• Developed an arts-based method for exploring moral emotions and values through creative expression, tested in several master's level courses (risk ethics, environmental ethics, climate ethics) and with educators at several workshops.
• Applied expressivist, materialist, and process-oriented pedagogical approaches
• Published with DOI: 10.48544/6721763c-7f92-491f-8aa1-ee6c68894ceb on edusources.nl

Work Package 5: Teach the Teachers

Objective Achieved: Designed a faculty development program with teaching materials, instructional guidelines, and best practices for empowering engineering educators to teach ethics confidently. The program was intended for the EWI faculty at TU Delft. 

Outcomes Delivered:

• Faculty needs assessment survey (March 2025, n=8)
• Interactive workshop at EE Education Day (July 2025, 6 participants)
• Comprehensive report with recommendations for multi-stage professional development model

Educational exercises developed:

• Collage-making for self-discovery in engineering ethics
• Responsible Anticipation and Visioneering
• Sci-Fi storyline mapping starting from writing prompts
• Caring at a distance and imagining distant stakeholders in environmental ethics (forthcoming in a published chapter)

Academic Publications:

• van Grunsven, J., Marin, L., Gammon, A. et al. 4E cognition, moral imagination, and engineering ethics education: shaping affordances for diverse embodied perspectives. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-09987-6 
• Zhu, Q., Marin, L., Medeiros Ramos, A., & Sundar Sethy, S. (2024). The purposes of engineering ethics education. In S. Chance, T. Børsen, D. A. Martin, R. Tormey, T. T. Lennerfors, & G. Bombaerts, The Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education (1st ed., pp. 27–43). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003464259-3
• Marin, L., Jalali, Y., Morrison, A., & Voinea, C. (2024). Reflective and dialogical approaches in engineering ethics education. In S. Chance, T. Børsen, D. A. Martin, R. Tormey, T. T. Lennerfors, & G. Bombaerts, The Routledge International Handbook of Engineering Ethics Education (1st ed., pp. 441–458). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003464259-30
• Marin, L. (2024). "Narrative Ethics And Narrative Pedagogy In Engineering Ethics Education: A Road Not (Yet) Taken." SEFI 2024 Conference Proceedings. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14254778
• Marin, L. (2025, forthcoming in conference proceedings). "Reflecting on values in technological innovation through science fiction narrative mapping." Proceedings of SEFI 2025 Conference. 
• Gammon, A. (forthcoming). "Engineering education for distant others: Climate engineering & thinking through distance." Chapter in edited volume on teaching environmental political theory.
• Marin, L. & Steinert, S. (2025). "CTRL+ Ethics: Large Language Models and Moral Deskilling in Professional Ethics Education." In Oxford Intersections: AI in Society, Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945215.003.0010

Public outreach

Embodied ethics education for engineers (mass-media article by Merel Engelsman)

Recommendations

For Educators Implementing These Exercises

1. Prioritize Process Over Product: The educational value of experiential exercises lies in the doing, not the artifact produced. Resist the temptation to evaluate based solely on final outputs (stories, collages, proposals). Build in structured reflection time where students articulate insights gained during the process.
2. Adapt to Disciplinary Context: While our exercises are designed for broad applicability, they work best when connected to students' specific engineering domains. Customize scenarios, technologies, and examples to match students' areas of study. For instance, the caring at distance exercise could focus on infrastructure engineering impacts on local communities rather than only climate engineering.
3. Scaffold Carefully: Students may initially resist creative or arts-based methods, particularly in technical disciplines. Provide a clear structure, model vulnerability by sharing your own creative attempts, and frame activities as "experiments" to reduce performance anxiety. Preparatory exercises that build specific skills (like visual deconstruction for collage-making) are essential.
4. Create Psychologically Safe Spaces: Experiential ethics requires students to engage emotionally and imaginatively, which involves risk-taking. Establish ground rules for respectful dialogue, validate diverse perspectives, and avoid premature critique during brainstorming phases. Consider anonymous submission options for initial drafts.
5. Integrate Across Curriculum: These exercises should not be isolated events but rather integrated into broader ethics curriculum. Connect experiential activities to the theoretical frameworks students are learning, reference earlier exercises when teaching new concepts, and build skill progressions across multiple years.
6. Allow Adequate Time: Rushed implementation diminishes learning. Science fiction narrative mapping requires minimum 90 minutes; collage-making works best with 60-90 minutes; the visioneering exercise needs 60-90 minutes; caring at a distance needs two full sessions. Plan accordingly and resist the urge to compress activities.
7. Facilitate, don't lecture: Prepare thoughtful debriefing questions, be comfortable with silence and ambiguity, and trust that students will generate valuable insights through guided exploration. Avoid providing "correct answers" too early.

For Researchers in Engineering Ethics Education

1. Develop Assessment Methods for Experiential Learning: The current research did not use validated instruments for assessing moral imagination, moral sensitivity, and other "soft" ethical skills cultivated through experiential methods - since these do not exist yet. We did deploy pre- and post-exercise surveys, but we did not gather a critical mass to draw strong conclusions. Future researchers should also work on combining new methods of assessment with the new pedagogical tools. 
2. Investigate Long-Term Impact: Our project documented immediate learning outcomes, but longitudinal research is needed. Do students who experience experiential ethics education demonstrate different professional behaviors years later? How do these methods compare to traditional approaches in long-term retention and application?
3. Explore neurodiversity issues in application: Preliminary findings suggest that embodied, hands-on methods may benefit neurodivergent students who struggle with purely verbal/analytical approaches. Systematic research on how different learning styles and cognitive profiles interact with experiential ethics pedagogy would enhance inclusive practice.
4. Study Scaling Challenges: Our exercises worked well in small-to-medium sized classes with engaged instructors. Research is needed on implementing experiential methods in large lectures, online/hybrid formats, and with instructors who have minimal ethics background. What minimal viable support structures enable scaling without losing pedagogical effectiveness?
5. Examine Cross-Cultural Applicability: All testing occurred within Dutch higher education context (at TU Delft, a technical university). How do these exercises translate to different cultural contexts where engineering education norms, student expectations, and ethical frameworks may differ? Comparative studies are needed for generalizability.
6. Integrate Emerging Technologies: Our work on LLMs and moral deskilling raises questions about how AI tools might support (rather than undermine) experiential ethics education. Could AI facilitate scenario generation, provide diverse stakeholder perspectives, or support reflection without replacing human judgment? 
7. Build Evidence Base for Faculty Development: The teach-the-teachers initiative revealed faculty receptiveness to practical support, but we need better understanding of what professional development actually changes teaching practice long-term. Research should examine not just immediate confidence gains but sustained implementation and continuous improvement in ethics teaching.
8. Connect to Professional Practice: Bridge between educational and professional contexts by studying how engineers in practice employ moral imagination, anticipation, and caring for distant others. What situations demand these capacities? How do professionals develop them outside formal education? Ethnographic research in engineering workplaces would enrich this initial pedagogical design.

For Institutional Leadership

1. Invest in Ethics Teaching Infrastructure: Sustainable ethics education requires more than individual faculty enthusiasm. Institutions should establish ethics teaching centres, maintain repositories of discipline-specific cases and exercises, provide instructional design support, and create communities of practice for ethics educators.
2. Recognize Ethics Teaching in Promotion/Tenure: Faculty development initiatives succeed only when institutions reward excellence in ethics teaching. Revise evaluation criteria to acknowledge innovation in pedagogical methods, scholarship of teaching and learning in ethics, and service supporting colleagues' ethics teaching capacity.
3. Support Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Effective engineering ethics education draws on philosophy, the social sciences, design, and the arts, alongside engineering expertise. Create structures (such as team teaching, joint appointments, and cross-department grants) that enable meaningful interdisciplinary work, rather than siloing ethics instruction.
4. Provide Adequate Resources: Experiential methods require materials (art supplies, printing for card decks), space (tables for group work, walls for displaying artefacts), and time investment (smaller classes, teaching assistants for facilitation). Budget accordingly rather than expecting ethics education to operate on the same resource model as technical lectures.

Practical outcomes

Exercises developed:

• Collage-making for self-discovery in engineering ethics
• Responsible Anticipation and Visioneering
• Sci-Fi storyline mapping starting from writing prompts
• Caring at a distance and imagining distant stakeholders in environmental ethics (forthcoming in a published chapter)