The Amazing Ethics Race

By Janice Stephenson, Rivka Guttman, Tina Cinelli and Melodie Hicks , Vanier College

At a Glance

Discipline

STEM
Health science

Instructional Level

College & CEGEP

Course

Intro to Nursing
Ethics

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

Group
Whole Class

Type of Tasks

Solving problems
Presenting

Technical Details

Class size

Small (20-49)
Medium (50-99)

Time

Single class period (< 90 mins)

Instructional Purpose

Application & knowledge building

Overview

In this activity-based seminar, teams of students race to complete a series of ethics challenges relating to academics and nursing.

By solving riddles, following clues, completing puzzles and discussing case studies students are encouraged to engage with the material and one another. Students are divided into teams and sent of one of two circuits through five stations, an instructor at each station checks the students work before providing the clue to the next station. The first team to complete all stations wins.

Instructional Objectives

To review the concepts covered in class
To apply those concepts to real life scenarios

Workflow & Materials

Activity Workflow

View on CourseFlow

Document

Worksheet 1

Janice Stephenson, Rivka Guttman, Tina Cinelli and Melodie Hicks

Document

Worksheet 2

Janice Stephenson, Rivka Guttman, Tina Cinelli and Melodie Hicks

Document

Article

Janice Stephenson, Rivka Guttman, Tina Cinelli and Melodie Hicks

Contributor's Notes

Benefits

The activity is fun and non-threatening
It encourages student involvement and builds teamwork
It uses healthy competition to present what is sometimes dry subject matter in an engaging way

Challenges

Team cohesion problems
Students running or getting carried away
Clues if misunderstood can send teams far afield

Tips

Warn security in your facility that an exercise is taking place
Remind the students to be respectful and quiet outside of the classroom
Monitor the teams during the activities and encourage full team participation
Use more than one variant of the challenges to discourage answer sharing

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Published: 15/08/2019

Copyright: © 2025 Stephenson, Guttman, Cinelli and Hicks. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication on this website is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.