A Guided Ethics Assessment for Early Prototypes in AI Education

Students and first-time developers building AI prototypes often struggle to translate high-level ethical principles into concrete actions relevant to their specific projects. This paper introduces a Guided AI Ethics Assessment, an interactive educational tool designed to bridge this gap. Through a guided questionnaire enriched with contextual hints, real-world case studies, and analogies, the tool helps students systematically analyze the purpose, data sources, and capabilities of their project. A key objective of this process is to ensure that high-risk and critical considerations, such as those outlined in the EU AI Act, are not overlooked. Based on their responses, the system employs a "rules-as-data" architecture to deterministically generate two key educational artifacts: a prioritized Risk Assessment Report that explains the potential issues identified during the self-assessment, and a transparent Decision Trace that shows the student how their design choices led to these specific recommendations.