Spencer Beaudette seeks to teach his fifth-grade students how to reject particular outlooks without declaring them altogether stupid or invalid. To achieve this, Beaudette discusses with his class what qualifies as art. He tasked his students to create something that they are sure is art and something that they are sure is not art. The students presented their works to the class for discussion. As Beaudette and his students found out, what qualifies as art is not an easy question to answer. However, Beaudette believes the lesson achieved the objective of teaching students opposing viewpoints exist that are not necessarily more right or wrong than our own.

Tim Fisher examines a troubling misconception about philosophy that he noticed his high school students possessed: that when it comes to philosophy, you can never be wrong. He expected incoming philosophy students to hold this belief, but was surprised to learn that even after completing his course, students still held the belief that philosophy had no wrong answers—that all views are equally reasonable. Fisher began to wonder where he went wrong. To rectify this misconception, Fisher details an exercise that he developed for second graders that forces students to justify their beliefs and teaches them to examine why one claim is more or less reasonable than another; the exercise is equally appropriate for high school students. The key to this exercise is to teach students to detach personal opinions from their reasoning.

Tim McCarthy and Lucas Jackson present a short story in which a group of scientists successfully create a self-aware synthetic human being. Calling himself HBP, the machine begins to quickly learn and becomes curious about the world, life, and humanity. On his first trip alone outside of the lab, HBP accidentally kills a mugger. The encounter trouble him and HBP begins to wonder what happens to a being’s consciousness after life. McCarthy and Jackson use this story to explore the concept of the soul and religion, as well as to explore what it means to be human.

Technological advance like Google Glass are innovative, yet isolating. Though features of such a new technology can help shape and make lives easier, they disconnect our natural human behaviors. The immediacy of technology may cause us to lose our abilities to be patient, rationalize, and allow for error, which are all natural and important parts of building personality and psyche development.

Third place PLATO contest winner James Drueckhammer argues for the existence of libertarian free will by way of describing and dissecting Aristotle’s theory of the agent-causal theory against its most popular refutation. In the end to the author gives libertarian free will prominence and life.

The author examines one of the most important questions in philosophy as she is asked “What is an identity?” and “What is the self?” She analyzes and debunks this question through a dialect between her and multiple “philosophers”.

A questioning of the proficiency of the American education system judged by preparedness of students for further education written by a junior in an American High School. He hypothesizes that knowledge of ethics can produce preparedness and is missing from American education system and needs to be utilized.

In this PLATO winning essay, Jared Corbet discusses the strength of the hard determinism argument against the notion of free will through historical lenses and comparisons to alternative theories such as libertarianism and compatibilism. Corbet in the end finds hard determinism to be the most logical explanation.

Examines a conflict found in the writings of Aristotle and Machiavelli considering steps towards a life of virtue and prominence. Aristotle puts value on happiness and welfare en route to a good life whereas Machiavelli is focused on the ability to use both good and bad action to control a situation. The author concludes balance of these qualities, a virtuous mean, is the most beneficial option, a notion that Machiavelli not directly but philosophically challenges.