This is another great interactive site created by Neal Agarwal @nealagarwal.
This is a sequence of variations on the classic trolley problem.
This is the basic problem:
"A runaway trolley bus is heading towards 5 people. They will be killed, but you can pull a lever to divert it to the other track, killing just 1 person instead of 5. What do you do?"
Each time you make choice you see some data about the number of people who made the same choice and then the problem moves on to a more complex one. https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
How to use this with students:
- Show the students the first problem and get them to discuss it together and rationalise their decision.
- Show them the outcome and then ask them how they would persuade the people who made a different choice that they were wrong.
- Show the students the next problem and put them into pairs to discuss their decision.
- Give the students a link to the site so that they can continue to work through the problems together.
- When they have finished, you can ask them:
- Which were the most difficult choices to make?
- Which choices do they feel worst about?
- What did they learn about their own and their partner's personal values from the problems?
- Why do they think the site was created?
- Ask them to make up their own set of 5 trolley problems.
If you are looking for a language focus for this, it's great for practicing conditionals for cause and effect, e.g. "If we do this, this will happen."
I hope your students enjoy this activity.
If you like this activity then you might want to check out my book Hacking Creativity https://payhip.com/b/HDeb where you can find many similar types of tasks and activities.
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