Background: The growing complexity of the impacts of computing technologies on adolescents’ lives require them to make similarly complex decisions around technology, fueling a rise in education efforts to look at the ethical implications of these advancements with young people. Though prior computing ethics education efforts integrate ethical perspectives, they have rarely drawn from scholarship on how to teach ethics and philosophy.

Objectives We developed a cross-disciplinary pedagogical intervention that blends ethics-focused computing education efforts like Youth as Philosophers of Technology with tools and best practices from Philosophy for Children (P4C), an approach for teaching philosophy to young people. We asked the following research questions: In a secondary computing classroom context, (1) How might adolescent students express ethical sensemaking when engaging with our pedagogical intervention? and (2) What opportunities for ethical sensemaking might our pedagogical intervention facilitate?

Methods: We implemented our intervention in a summer academic program in the northwest US for 10 secondary students (age 14-18) from low-income families and who would be the first in their families to pursue a post-secondary education (i.e. first-generation). We then conducted a qualitative analysis of student classwork and instructor reflections using a combination of inductive and deductive coding.

Findings: Students expressed their ethical sensemaking by considering multiple perspectives, questioning the status quo, wrestling with dissonance between their principles and actions, and rejecting the good/bad binary. These expressions manifested in three distinct opportunities for ethical sensemaking: when students made connections to their everyday life, engaged in supportive dialogue with their peers, and interacted with instructional scaffolds.

Implications: This study indicates the promise of drawing on pedagogies from philosophy when thinking about ethical sensemaking in computing education. Our identification of expressions of and opportunities for adolescents’ ethical sensemaking while using this blended pedagogy advances our understanding of computing ethics education, and offers insights for other ethics education efforts in secondary computing.