The Honors College at UTC requires each student write a Departmental Honors Thesis for their senior year. For my project, I researched the field of Computing Ethics. Specifically, the ethical perspectives of professionals in software development and curation. When a developer, security consultant, or operations specialist makes any decision about a product, that decision comes from what that programmer values and, given a buildup of similar choices, can affect the project. Disasters like Cambridge Analytica mass-downloading information from Facebook, as well as employee walk-outs and marches like the march by Uber drivers demanding better pay, show that there are major concerns for the held ethical values of programmers.

My research examines on the results of an Ethical Values Survey for Computer Professionals. The survey has 10 scenarios, each one setting one pair of values against each other to discover whether respondents would treat one principle as more valuable than another, or whether they treat them both as neutral. The principles tested are:

• Transparency to the Client
• Ensuring Product Quality
• Respect of Privacy
• Respect of Intellectual Property
• Helping Colleagues.

From early on in development, I named the research "Mutual Exclusion," to represent the difficulty in choosing between two values placed in opposing positions. By placing these values against each other, I could learn how an ethical principle is valued relative the others.

Data collection officially closed February 13th, 2020, with a total of 90 responses from local professionals in computing. The data confirmed several major discoveries for programmers in south-east Tennessee:

• Most programmers seem to value their coworkers more than the good of a singular project
• Older programmers care even more about coworkers than younger respondents do
• Respondents out of college are more likely to value releasing a project quickly, even at the expense of quality or privacy
• Respondents out of college are more likely to value intellectual property, while students are more likely to respect privacy
• Older programmers and non-students value clients more than younger students

Most of these results match common understandings of programming (such as more experienced programmers being more beholden to their bosses), but it is significant that all programmers, especially older ones, value their coworkers, or at least treat it as the ethical thing to do. This shows that, contrary to the stereotype, programmers are not predisposed to live in solitude or to be antisocial. Programmers feel a responsibility to their colleagues.
My senior thesis was a traipse into wildly unfamiliar territory. I developed an ethics survey, comparing the pros and cons of several survey-distribution services, I built an external service in Heroku. I wrote several scenarios and ethical dillemas before selecting the 10 most best ones. I championed my survey, reaching out to city leaders and companies. I compiled the data using Python. I learned advanced topics in statistics such as power, correlation, and conditional distributions. I drafted, rewrote, and defending my thesis in front of my faculty advisory board. Through my experience writing my thesis, I played many roles and gained experience in many fields. I am glad that I pushed myself to write a senior thesis, because I learned more about myself and the wide variety of jobs a single project requires than I ever could have in a class. I was forced to take my studies beyond the classroom into the city of Chattanooga, and that increased my networking skills and flexibility as a programmer.

• QuestionPro (considered engine for the survey)
• Qualtrics (considered engine for the survey)
• Google Forms (chosen engine for the survey)
• Google Web Apps (integrated with Google Forms to manage responses)
• Javascript (Heroku)
• Python (Data compilation)

• After April 2020, my Honors Thesis will be posted on UTC Scholarly
• To see the survey, visit bit.ly/tech-values-survey
• After completing the survey, users are treated to a results page showing them how they compare to other respondents. See an example results page (I'm no longer maintaining this page. If it doesn't work, sorry).

At UTC, I applied for the Honors College's Innovations in Honors program and graduated as an Innovation Scholar in 2020. The Innovations program requires each student to participate in a two-semester Innovation Lab where students use Design Thinking to find and solve problems in Chattanooga. The Rebecca Jones class decided to center on problems in education.

Early on in research, my team decided to focus on Technical Education. Technical Education is the under-utilized sector of jobs that use hands-on skills for careers, such as construction, electrical-systems-repairing, massaging, diesel truck driving, airplane piloting, etc. These skills are specialized abilities that require dedicated facilities to teach, which relegates the education of these jobs to "Techincal Schools" or secondary majors in some Universities. Most students are led to believe that the standard University pathway is the only way to gain a successful career, but Technical certifications are just as good, are in higher demand, and take less time to copmlete.

To support this under-represented side of the education system, the Hamilton County Department of Education established the Future Ready Institutes as programs in Chattanooga high schools to teach these skills to students as early as possible. Our project in the UTC Innovation Lab was to help develop ways to market to high-schoolers the importance and benefits of the Future Ready Institutes.

We got into contact with Blake Freeman from the Hamilton County Department of Education and talked with him on the needs of marketing for the Future Ready Institutes. After talking to him, we designed several different types of campaigns for fliers for middle-and-high schoolers.

Based on our talks with high-schoolers, and the already existing oversaturation of advertising in the digital age, we decided to go the difficult route of currying to high-school culture by making memes based on posters. Due to the way memes work, these posters would have a very short life-span, but if done right, could be far more effective than a formal poster in capturing a high-school audience. This is the main strength of design thinking, that it forces people to talk to their target audience and create something that will work for them.

The most important step of the Design Thinking process is constant prototyping with feedback from stakeholders. While we were able to visit Red Bank High School and get feedback from actual students, we were never able to get consistent communication with the Department of Education. Due to this, the fliers were never implemented, and were left as an unused project. Despite this, the Innovation Lab taught me the basics of Design Thinking and the value of rapid prototyping. I worked with professionals and students outside my regular field and discovered my own limits compared to a large-scale project like the Future-Ready Institutes. I learned a lot, and I plan to take my abilities in Design Thinking with me to whatever career I find myself in.

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• Design Thinking
• Types of Marketing Strategies
• Graphic Design
• Time Management

• I am too quick to take every job, sometimes excluding others from the work
• Despite my abilities at Time Management, I am too ambitious with how I set deadlines, especially for work that requires collaboration
• I assume most people use the same communcation channels as I do, leading to missed communications