In various fields of science and technology, Japan has almost reached the stage of the “Front-runner”, after finishing up, what is called, the “Catch-up” era. However, engineering education and its social system, which have contributed to science and technology, now cannot meet our very different requirements for the “Front-runner” era. In this essay, it was pointed out that the “Knowledge-based Society” should be appropriate for the “Front-runner” era, and was also indicated specifically that the old engineering education in the “Catch-up” era is insufficient to create the “Knowledge-based Society”. In addition to this, I argued how important the engineering education reform is in order to improve engineers' intelligence and their status in the “Knowledge-based Society”.

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Any necessary abilities for engineer in several manufacturing process problems are out lined. On the first half, the importance in the situation and measuring for several manufacturing process phenomena are mentioned. On the latter half, the necessary point of view and effort toward several manufacturing problem for engineers are proposed

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Medium-and small-sized companies have held up Japanese technologies which situated top level in the world as far. However, for the technologies of medium-and small-sized companies to keep the top-level in the 21 centuries, researchers and engineers are demand to have high technologies. Those engineers are hoped for to have not only “knowledge”, but also “creativity, feeling and experience”. Therefore, in order to create such professional engineers, educational institute must have a function by which a practical training and education can be conducted.

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In order for researchers and engineers to deal with complicated problems of tomorrow, both fundamental knowledge of science and technology and professional high abilities of problem-finding and problem-solving are needed. The engineering education at Nagoya University is composed of substantial basic education to provide fundamental knowledge and comprehensive training to make use of wide knowledge. Engineering design education nourishes wide visions and professional abilities. This paper first discusses the role that design subjects play in the curriculums whose emphasis is on natural and engineering sciences. It then presents a typical design subject “Creative Experiments for Comprehensive Engineering” which aims at cultivating the professional ability to creatively find and solve problems. In order for engineering education to meet the needs of the society, the help from industry is of vital importance.

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In Faculty of Engineering at Shizuoka University, a new one-year educational program of mechatronics for newcomers will start at April in 2006. This program involves three stages designed to enhance their motivation and creativity in engineering. At the first and second stages, there are three activities; practicing digital circuits, controlling robots with Boe-Bot from Parallax Inc., and making their own microcontroller boards. At the third stage, each student cooperates with his team-mates to make a robot loaded his own board and through the game-type of competition the performance of each team-robot is scored. Through this program, we hope that our students enhance their engineering motivation and creativity.

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Aichi Institute of Technology aims to answer the needs of society through the training of engineers to play a part in society's projects. In response to changes in the needs of both society and the students, a new subject course has been set up under the name ‘Monozukuri Culture’. The course focuses on human values in the production system. Students are offered motivation through ‘challenge projects’, and led to create things with their own hands in a workshop called ‘Mirai Kobo’. As a way of contributing still more to society, Aichi Institute of Technology is also engaged in holding various events, including the ‘AIT Science Award’ contest for promising high school students who are studying science and technology.

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Recently, the Advanced Courses of Electronic System Engineering and Architecture and Civil Engineering of Gifu National College of Technology have introduced a creative subject, “Creative Engineering Practice”. In this subject, students study intellectual property rights. More specifically, they learn and practice industrial proprietary rights, procedures for obtaining a patent right, how to use Industrial Property Digital Library and so forth, along with the practice of creative product design. The industrial property rights education in collaboration with the creative product design education has been carried out by the cooperation of Japan Patent Office, Japan Institute of Invention and Innovation and a patent attorney. Through the instruction of the cooperative members, great educative results have been obtained. In this paper, we will describe the contents of the subject together with its items to pursue an upward spiral of progress.

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A new educational program which encourages creative ability and inventive genius of the students has been introduced into the curricula of Shizuoka Institute of Science and Technology since 2003. This program is referred to as “Exercises for Creation and Invention.” This paper presents a discussion about the preparation, organization, detailed policies and results of the program which was conducted in 2004 after a preliminary trial in 2003. This program includes such creative work as the production of novel electrical and mechanical devices, the production of competitive machines for contests involving various kinds of robots or electric vehicles, research on specific subjects, work to obtain a license or a qualification and student work as volunteers in schools and homes for the aged or the handicapped.

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In the engineering education, it is very difficult that creativity is cultivated to the students. A mean for the creativity training seems to be that the students experience the engineering technology of various fields. We consider the creativity in the students is fostered from various experiences. We have regarded that production and the race entry of the racing solar car were incorporated in the field of the engineering education as being the aid for raising the creativity, and then, the educational activity has been continued. Through the activity, the students not only acquired the engineering knowledge and experienced the technology of various field but also developed the engineer mind required for “making the thing”. From the results obtained here, we expect that the technical creativity will be build up in the students.

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We have developed a new type of handcraft exercise program that aims to stimulate student's creativity on the way of design and fabrication of the subject machines. Conventional handicraft exercise program used to aim at letting students learn procedures of machining operation in accordance with a designated manual. Students having experienced our conventional exercise did not fully satisfied at those programs because of the lack in a room for their idea and creativity. Authors, a group of both technical and academic staffs, have developed and started the new type of program since 2003 at the Creation Plaza in Nagoya University. Developed program is classified into grades according to the difference in technical contents required for students.

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It is required to educate electrical and electronic engineers who can work to make technological products in the present state of highly developed technology and science. The engineers have to get the abilities to understand the fundamental theory, to apply it, and to express ideas for the production, namely to design them. Since the electrical and electronic phenomena are invisible and the theory is abstract, the lectures on the electrical and electronic theory tend to become abstract. To solve these problems, we proceed with the improvement of the curriculum by introducing the student's experiences on making products in order to learn the relations between the abstract theory and the real phenomena, and to practice the design power. We believe that these experiences give students the interests and motivations to understand lectures on the electrical and electronic theories.

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In this paper, the educational practice of the master course of techno-business administration (MTA) at Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT) is introduced to propose the practical engineering education at a postgraduate level. MTA was established in 2003 on the basis of hundred years' engineering education at NIT. An objective of this school is to educate engineers to be leaders, entrepreneurs and managers. The practical tuition covers the fields in Industrial Management of Technologies, Core-Technologies and Laboratories work. Among these, the most focused and effective subject is “Case-Study,” in which students are encouraged to simulate business settings using elemental technologies developed by teaching staff. Discussions are made to apply the technology to match the possible markets. This type of experiences certainly motivates the students work and is clearly reflected in their research paper.

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We propose a new approach to education of so called “engineering ethics”. This approach has two important elements in its teaching system. One is “problem-solving learning”, and the other is “discussion ability”. So far, engineering ethics started at the ethical standpoint. But we put the viewpoint of problem-solving learning at the educational base of engineering ethics. Because many problems have complicated structures, so if we want to solve them, we should discuss each other. Problem-solving ability and discussion ability, they help engineers to solve the complex problems in their social everyday life. Therefore, Meijo University names engineering ethics “ethics for engineers”. At Meijou University about 1300 students take classes in both ethics for engineers and environmental ethics for one year.

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The engineering education through making robots which needs various techniques such as construction of mechanism and electric circuit design are very useful for training of the students' creativity and developing the students' personality. Toyota National College of Technology has participate in NHK Robocon competition for sixteen years and Robocup competition for four years as a part of engineering education getting spectacular results in those competitions. This paper discusses the present circumstances and its effect of participation in Robocon/RoboCup competition for the engineering education, based on the students' questionnaire survey. It is described to participate in NHK Robocon competition is very important for enhancing the students' knowledge and experience. Furthermore, the participation in Robocup competition brings better results for student' personality development as compared with participation in only Robocon competition.

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The object of this paper is to suggest an education model as a cooperative activity of industry, school and local government in science museums. Nagoya City Science Museum has opened the new exhibit on electric pole maintenance since 2002, which makes a visitor a temporary electrician working at a height of 3 meters. The exhibit, named “Be an Electrician”, is focusing on stimulating young people's interest in industrial technology. The electric pole and equipments on the pole like transformer, electric wires and so forth were donated from an electric power company to the museum. The museum manages volunteers including an active electrician and students to study engineering, who instruct the visitors in the bucket how to change the insulator on the pole. The active electrician also instructs some technical high school students in practical works at height. This new exhibit indicates the science museum positioned between companies and schools will make it possible to extend internship.

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Some cooperative methods have been proposed and executed as the R&D (research and development) between universities and industries meld together to form a new hybeid business. This paper proposes the ides of “Fusion Education” for the advancement of education and for fostering new business. In fusion education, university students will begin by mainly verifying the application potential of a developed system such as modulated robotic software, for example, and improve specific areas when and if needed. Then, the university will rank the systems according to its reliability or safety record (based on the student) complete verification test which includes data on when the robot will be operated and under what varying conditions (such as performance in various private houses). The university essentially gives students the chance to find a solution to practical problems while the industry gets a reliable (fully authorized) system as result of this education process. The concept and feasibility of this “fusion education” will now be discussed.

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The seminar ‘Practice on Manufacturing Technology by Advanced Machine Tools’ for high school students was held at the supporting center for technology education of Gifu University, under the sponsorship of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. This seminar was held, hoping that many students become interested in manufacturing through the experience of the seminar. Operating CNC milling machine and CNC wire-cut electric discharge machine, they made original nameplates. Participants made the program to control CNC machine tools themselves. In this report, some valuable results obtained through such experience are explained.

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The present paper describes the introduction of materials science and engineering to high school students through the science partnership program (SPP) planed by the ministry of education and science. Four educational topics of material science and engineering, namely, light emitting diodes (LED), carbon nano-tubes, bio-materials and traditional structural materials were selected for the program. Successive lectures were given on all the topics and practical experiments were carried out on the fabrication of an electrical circuit for LED and manufacturing of silver rings. In order to investigate the outcome of the program, a questionnaire and hearings were conducted. The opinions reflect the effectiveness of young teaching assistants in motivating and alleviating the interest of the students in the SPP program.

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This paper discusses the methods of implementation and improvement adopted in the energy education program of “Marugoto Taiken World” (“Total Experience World”) at Aichi Institute of Technology. The program, which is aimed at high school, junior high school and elementary school students, has been carried on at Aichi Institute of Technology for a number of years now, and the authors have been involved in the energy education project for the past four years. During that time, the following four courses have been held : 1) Let's use wind power to generate electricity, 2) Let's use flowers to build a solar battery, 3) Let's use bottles to build a fuel cell battery, 4) Let's make all sorts of batteries.

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This article is the result of our project objective to engage architecture and design students at Daido Institute of Technology in actual city planning problems. With the goal of proposing student generated solutions to the city problem offers, we focused on creating a citizen-based town project that would result in the eventual scenic renewal of an area in the south part of Nagoya where presently exists an incongruent mix of homes and factories. The results of this project suggest the creation of a new, symbiotic relationship between the various competing interests for this urban space.

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The authors proposed a high-quality and small-capacity lecture-video-file creating system for distance e-learning system. Examining the feature of the lecturing scene, the authors ingeniously employ two kinds of image-capturing equipment having complementary characteristics : one is a digital video camera with a low resolution and a high frame rate, and the other is a digital still camera with a high resolution and a very low frame rate. By managing the two kinds of image-capturing equipment, and by integrating them with image processing, we can produce course materials with the greatly reduced file capacity : the course materials satisfy the requirements both for the temporal resolution to see the lecturer's point-indicating actions and for the high spatial resolution to read the small written letters. As a result of a comparative experiment, the e-lecture using the proposed system was confirmed to be more effective than an ordinary lecture from the viewpoint of educational effect.

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A follow-up system of education was constructed to allow the students to check and evaluate the subjects they attended. The teachers had to show them the improvement plans of the subjects in respect of the items that received lower marks in the middle of a term. The students were able to check and evaluate the same subjects again in the end of the term. The teachers had to submit these results and the grade materials to a member of the follow-up committee. The member reviewed the results and interviewed the teachers to find better solutions. The follow-up system composed of these processes has improved the instructional skill of the faculty for the four years. Moreover, this system itself has been also checked and improved.

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This paper investigates graduation researches applying the national college robot contest whose rules become complicated gradually. First, an analysis of our students participating in the contest indicates that they are almost beginners, and some instruction methods for such beginners are presented. Second, the planning and the making process of a robot for the national college robot contest in 2003 are introduced, and a graduation research on the robot employing a bogie suspension system is illustrated. Finally, two improvement examples of engineering experiment in the electronic mechanical engineering department, which are fed back information gotten through the instruction of the graduation research, are introduced.

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