Ethical thinking and programming

Abstract

There is an increasing prevalence of programming in mathematics education. In this paper, we focus on ethical aspects of programming by first presenting a literature review. Three interrelated topics are identified in the review: reasons to include ethics in programming, code literacy, and facilitating ethical thinking. These three topics are then used to reflect on ethical thinking and programming in three tasks developed by a lower secondary school teacher. We argue that the context of programming tasks such as climate change, sustainability, and decision-making of self-driving cars, can facilitate students’ ethical thinking alongside their learning of how to program.