A Norwegian school is using a video game to teach ethics

Students at Nordahl Grieg high school in Norway are playing Telltale’s The Walking Dead in class in order to better learn about ethics. Norwegian news outlet NRK.no aired a short piece about the class, which has since been posted to YouTube and subtitled. In the video, instructor Tobias Staaby explains that he wanted a good catalyst for discussions about ethical dilemmas, which fans of The Walking Dead can tell you are huge part of the game.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead series is famous for putting the player in life-or-death ethical quandaries and forcing them to make difficult decisions. A creative teacher could probably use the game to identify moral dilemmas and explore those dilemmas with a class. As it so happens, one ethics teacher is doing just that. The video above is a Norwegian news report on Nordahl Grieg high school, whose ethics class is using The Walking Dead to explore ethical quandaries of an extreme and often zombie-tinged nature. (Be sure to turn on “Translate” in the closed-captioning so you can understand what everyone’s saying.) This is a smart idea that, if implemented correctly and run well, could really get students engaged with and talking about the fundamentals of ethics.