Gaming for Good: A One Day Instructional Design Hackathon
The pedagogy team at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is always working to develop new tools, resources, activities, and lesson plans that apply active learning to teach ethics-related topics in an immersive and engaging way. This Spring, they had an idea — host a competition to create the best game or lesson plan for facilitating difficult conversations. Organized by Tomer Perry, Associate Director of Pedagogy and Maxine Gill, Pre-Doctoral Fellow, the one-day event, “Innovating Civil Discourse: An Instructional Design Hackathon,” welcomed students and scholars from Boston area colleges and universities from any background to design something ready for use in a classroom.
The projects were judged by Marta McAlister, Director of Gemini for Education; Eliza O'Neil, Senior Curriculum Manager at The Constructive Dialogue Institute; and Eric Beerbohm, Faculty Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
The winning team, Luis Gaitan, Abeeha Tahir, Raia Karmali, and Shreya Goel, created a digital game called GeneEthics. A decision-making simulation built around ethical dilemmas, GeneEthics is intended for Harvard College students concentrating in STEM-related fields. Tahir explained the team’s motivation. “The problem we wanted to solve came from something we noticed. Roughly half of incoming students enter natural sciences or engineering pathways, and many are thinking about careers in medicine, yet there is no formal pre-med track. That means students are navigating some of the biggest decisions of their lives without any structured opportunity to form their ethical stance. And that gap is exactly where GeneEthics lives, because bioethics does not give you answers. It gives you trade-offs.”
To elaborate, Karmali gave an example of one of these trade-offs. “The idea was to help students understand the competing moral frameworks surrounding bioengineering technologies and recognize the ethical assumptions they bring into their future careers, because those who shape future technologies will also shape future society. The future of designer babies will likely emerge gradually rather than all at once. Society may initially justify genetic editing through disease prevention and humanitarian goals, yet over time, the line between healing and enhancement may become increasingly difficult to define.”
GeneEthics not only helps students navigate complex bioethical situations, but it provides a mechanism for faculty to facilitate these difficult discussions. “The project gives the professor the ability to create groups of students with distinct roles to talk about the dilemma. The discussions happen live, and not through the digital interface. But then the digital interface that prepped the students for the case being discussed tracks how their ideas and opinion shifts, and gives them a report of where their ethical patterns lie in that point in time,” said Gaitan.
All four group members (Gaitan ’25, Karmali ’26, Tahir ’26, Goel ’26) are recent graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Ed.M program in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology. Despite their academic background, they had never shared a class or worked in a group together before the Hackathon, and the team was randomly assigned their group on the day of the event.
“I signed up by myself, so I wasn’t expecting to find any familiar faces at all. To my surprise, I got to see students that I have interacted with in the past, but never really gotten to know or collaborated with. It was a welcome surprise and experience to go from acquaintance to friends over the period of the hackathon,” shared Gaitan.
Tahir illuminated the groups dynamics. “In the first few hours, we just had an open conversation where everyone was actually listening and building on each other's ideas, and I think that set a great tone for how we worked together throughout the day.”
Goel opened up about the back and forth, iterative nature of their collaboration. “Good instructional design comes from wrestling deeply with questions, testing ideas, refining them, and not stopping until the solution feels meaningful and intentional. Productive struggle is not something to bypass; it’s often where the best ideas emerge!”
Gaian is currently a research affiliate in The Morality Lab at Boston College, and ultimately hopes to work at a university where he can help students thrive. Goel has a similar desire to work in learning design in the higher education space. After graduation, Karmali wants to continue to play and make games that create engaging learning experiences for adult learners.
Tahir explained her wish for the future. “I want to be in a space where the work I do is not just meaningful but is contributing to something larger, whether that is building better systems for how people learn, make decisions, or navigate complex challenges. This hackathon honestly felt like a preview of that kind of work, and it made me even more certain about the direction I want to go in.”
Runner(s)-Up
Two teams tied for second place. The first, with members Kelly Ding and Cristina DeOliveira, created a board game titled Commonwealth AI to help undergraduate and graduate students practice ethical reasoning with case studies involving the impacts of Artificial Intelligence in real-world settings.
Players take on roles within a fictional company's advisory board, working through four phases of research, development, deployment, and audit. At each phase, new incidents arise, and the players must take a stance, defend their stance, and vote accordingly. Each decision is a tradeoff between innovation, public trust, and reputation, and players must argue for those tradeoffs explicitly. Through gameplay, participants confront how AI systems produce real-world consequences, how bias and competing priorities shape institutional decisions, and how the values embedded in a technology are rarely the result of any single choice.
The second team, with members Kat Mitchell, Ashley Blazek, and Qiao Le Lee, started their project by asking how to encourage students to ask meaningful questions, so that they can engage in civil discourse.
That is what WOBY, their conversation-based card game, aims to answer. Players take turns to answer meaningful and challenging questions of mutual concern. The game is designed with the aim of players eventually crafting their own questions and reflections.
With a constructivist gameplay and universal design learning principles in mind, learners will understand that curiosity is a tool for identifying the “why” behind people's positions. The game encourages players to develop crucial conversational skills, such as active listening and perspective taking.
Due to overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants, organizers, and judges, the Center is already planning a second hackathon event, so stay tuned!