From Empathy to Engineering: A Pedagogical Framework and its Authentic mHealth Implementation

Abstract

Accessible design is crucial for ensuring equitable access to digital services, yet it remains relegated to elective modules or late-stage compliance in many computing curricula. We propose a human-centered pedagogical framework that embeds inclusive thinking across key phases of the software development process. We introduce two reusable educational tools: a cross-phase persona engine for guiding requirement prioritization and evaluation, and a guideline-reflection instrument that couples accessibility heuristics with structured prompts. The framework is instantiated in an undergraduate course through the redesign of a national mobile health (mHealth) application—a domain where poor accessibility directly exacerbates systemic health inequities. Preliminary pre-course surveys ( N = 45) reveal moderate conceptual knowledge of inclusive design but low confidence in its application, underscoring the need for structured longitudinal scaffolding. We discuss the course design, assignments, toolkit and argue that this approach helps students move from abstract empathy to actionable accessibility, offering a framework that can be adapted to other domains.

Submission

ICSE 2026

Citation

Wei Wang, Jialong Li, and Devi Karolita. 2026. From Empathy to Engineering: A Pedagogical Framework and its Authentic mHealth Implementation. In 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’26), April 12–18, 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages.