Work In Progress - Building Empathy without Community Partners

Project-based learning is core to many first-year engineering, engineering design, and engineering capstone courses.Ideally, students in courses that use project-based learning work on real-world projects that are relevant to their communities with a sponsor or outside partner who helps to guide the work and assess deliverables.By working with a community partner or client, students practice incorporating outside perspectives and empathy into their designs.Realistically, a variety of constraints including time, location, class size, and workload prevent faculty from developing community partnerships/clients for all their student projects.This paper will discuss ways to use tools like personas in combination with secondary research to mimic many of the benefits associated with community partnerships.We provide suggestions for partnerships with campus units, discuss the impact of these tools in one civil engineering course, and explore areas for future research.Examples of defining and exploring community partners in these courses will be presented.