Student Coursework as Collaborative Science: Development of a Flood Modeling Course to Educate Future Engineers and Support Local Stakeholders

Participatory research and community engagement increasingly play a vital role in strengthening relationships between academia and local communities, helping to ensure research questions are highly relevant and meaningful. To this end, we have progressively developed a Flood Hazards Engineering and Adaptation course at George Mason University in which student groups are paired with Virginia stakeholders to identify and address local flooding concerns. This course is part of both the larger Virginia Climate Center and a Seed Translational Research Project involving professionals from varied disciplines including scientists, engineers, and communicators. Over 100 students have participated in this course since its inception in 2023. Through the course, students learn to develop flood models for their local stakeholders and assess mitigation strategies to minimize flooding in their project areas. These projects are defined by preliminary stakeholder discovery interviews (including iterative follow-up interviews, to which students are invited) to ensure our models fit stakeholder needs. Our stakeholders are very diverse and have included municipalities, counties, planning district commissions, and indigenous tribes across Virginia with varied socioeconomic statuses. Each project is unique and demands different modeling solutions, providing unique experiences for each student group as well as high-value outputs to meet each stakeholder’s needs. In this presentation we explain in detail the development of the course as an example for future implementations of similar work, while additionally exploring the following questions: 1. How did we initiate engagement with stakeholders?, 2. How did we identify a minimum viable product for the course?, 3. What lessons have we learned through this process?, and 4. What do we wish we had done differently? We aim for this to serve as a valuable prototype and inspiration for similar stakeholder-driven coursework.