Online in-game user communities therefore provide a familiar means for students to explore the ethical issues around the importance of group work and communication for engineering projects, as summarized in Table 1.
Prior to teaching this case, instructors should assess who in their teaching group has experience of ingame user communities, and which ones (e.g. Minecraft, WoW, Sims).
The class itself can begin with a discussion facilitated by the instructor about the purpose of group work in engineering practices, and the perceived challenges to that way of working.
Instructors can then divide the class into smaller groups, with each group containing a variety of experience across different gaming communities.
Students in each group are asked to share and compare their stories of working and playing collectively in online games including details of how they picked their team; what their mission was; why they needed to work in a group (i.e. What they were unable to achieve on their own); what the team learnt from each other; and how they managed group dynamics when there was friction between players.
Points for discussion can include reflection on the ways in which in-game groups enable players to learn about how best to communicate problems by improving skills around language, behavioral codes, and social norms (NESTA 2009).
Based on their reflections, each small group should develop a shortlist of answers to the questions: What are the benefits of working in groups? What are the challenges? What have they learnt from their experiences of collective online playing? These answers will be brought back into a final discussion with the entire class where students reflect on these answers, and examine how these issues will vary between the context of online games, and of real-life engineering practice.
Tutors can also supplement these discussion-based activities with additional game-play with tools like the MinecraftEdu customized modification which allows tutors to easily set up situations in the Minecraft game, whereby set groups of students will need to work collectively in order to complete their goal.
These activities will further complement the above discussions by allowing students to reflect on whether the experience of group working was different when they were working with people that they already knew from their course and potentially saw on a more regular basis.
The darker sides of these group dynamics in social technologies can also be explored in the second case study on cyber bullying.