Dr. Richard Cimino, Senior University Lecturer, and collaborators at UConn and Pitt have been awarded a $750,000 Tier-2 IUSE grant for Fall 2025 titled Collaborative Research: Using Digital Narratives and Data Analytics to Enhance Ethical Judgment Education and Assessment. This grant builds on and expands the work from their successful T1 project that resulted in the creation of Mars! An Ethical Expedition, a narrative choose-your-own adventure style digital game for teaching engineering ethics.

They plan to leverage the digital game platform developed to explore two new research questions. The first question centers on using the digital game to provide differing contexts to ethical dilemmas to better understand what factors and biases may influence student ethical judgments. The second question focuses on incorporating narrative responses into Mars! and using the power of large language models, machine learning, and data analytics to develop Mars! as a scalable tool for both teaching and assessing student ethical judgments.