Abstract
The School of Social Information Science at the University of Hyogo conducts Problem-Based Learning (PBL) for first and second year undergraduates, using actual data from partner companies, with the goal of developing data scientists with practical skills. The data scientist that our department aims to foster is not only a person with the ability to analyze data using IT skills, but also a person with the ability to discover and formulate issues in the real world, collect the necessary data, and make proposals to improve society using the results of the analysis. In the early grades, students do not have data analysis skills or IT skills, but by analyzing data in a way that suits their skills and experiencing the process of proposing sales measures for actual stores, we aim to make them interested in improving management and to learn the importance of thinking not only from data but also from the field. Since the establishment of the department in 2019, we have conducted PBL for first-year students three times and for second-year students twice, and have evaluated the exercises by taking student questionnaires after each. In this paper, we describe the outline of the PBL exercises conducted this year, and the advantages and challenges of PBL using real data obtained through the PBL exercises so far.
