Speculative Ethics Classroom Exercises
This page contains information and resources about the Black Mirror Writers Room and other teaching exercises for ethical speculation in computing. For more teaching exercises and resources on technology ethics education, see our Responsible Computing page.
Black Mirror Writers Room
Let your imagination run wild in this creative speculation activity that helps students think through possible negative consequences of technology, as well as how we might move towards the futures we want.
Ethics & Cybersecurity for AI
Facilitate discussions on computer vision and threat modeling, attack vectors for machine learning, and cybersecurity/ethics of machine learning applied to spatial data described in this blog post.
Issue Spotting and Future News
This assignment focuses on issue spotting in the news, creative ethical speculation, and thinking through solutions and better futures.
Related Publications
Shamika Klassen, Joanna Mendy, and Casey Fiesler. Putting the “Black” in Black Mirror: Ethical Speculation via Design Fiction from Black Women and Femmes. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (GROUP), 2026.
Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler, Michael Madaio, John Tang, and Richmond Y. Wong. Generative AI Going Awry: Enabling Designers to Proactively Avoid It in CSCW Applications."In Companion Publication of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2024), 2024.
Samantha Dalal, Julie Jarzemsky, Michelle Tran, and Casey Fiesler. Cyber + AI in the Classroom: A Case Study. 2023.
Shamika Klassen and Casey Fiesler. ‘Run a little wild with your imagination’: Ethical Speculation in Computing with Black Mirror. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2022), 2022.
Casey Fiesler. The Black Mirror Writers Room: The Case (and Caution) for Ethical Speculation in CS Education. 2022.
Casey Fiesler. Ethical Speculation in the Computing Classroom. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2021), 2021.
Stacy Doore, Casey Fiesler, Michael S. Kirkpatrick, Evan Peck, and Mehran Sahami. Assignments that blend ethics and technology. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2020), 2020.
Casey Fiesler. Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation. Originally published in How We Get to Next, 2018.
Casey Fiesler. "Innovating like an optimist, preparing like a pessimist: Ethical speculation and the legal imagination." Colo. Tech. LJ 19 (2021): 1.
Much of this work was funded by the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, as well as the CISE and SaTC directorates of the National Science Foundation.