Humans and animals coexist on this planet, and their relationship has become increasingly diverse. Human societies from different corners of the world cannot be maintained without the use of animals for various purposes, such as for food, clothing, companionship, and therapy. From an educational viewpoint, this diverse relationship between humans and animals must be studied. Therefore, this study reviewed textbooks used in elementary and secondary schools of Saitama City, and examined the idea of animals owned by ordinary students. The results revealed that, in the textbooks, there were 16 specific phrases regarding animals, in particular growing, physiology and ecology, and categorization. Cluster analysis showed similar descriptions of animals among the subjects.

This study aims to clarify the design theory of technology and engineering literacy, established as a survey field of technology education at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and obtain recommendations on student ability through a survey that involved junior high school students from Japan. Technology and engineering literacy consists of three categories: the assessment area, practice and context, and assessment target that measures the knowledge and abilities students are expected to have acquired by the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Survey questions were created by correlating the assessment targets with the elements of practice and context. One of the problems was translated into Japanese, and the survey was administered to 2,096 Japanese eighth graders. On comparing the results of this survey with surveys conducted in the United States, it was found that Japanese students showed skillfulness at “grasping a problem" and “examining solutions." However, they seemed to be less skillful at understanding and expressing an “interpretation of problem-solving."

To extract the best from children's abilities, it is necessary for teachers to simultaneously grasp the situation and the learning state of each individual learner. Therefore, we consider a method to quantitatively visualize the situation and the learning state of each learner by effectively adopting an optimal advanced technology such as information obtained by manipulating items in remote locations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reports on the system that could grasp the learning situation of each learner and record a learning history at the time of the class including experiments and/or practice. Hence, this study aims to develop a system that would grasp the learning situation using IoT and effectively support class education with experiments and/or practice. In this paper, the learning history display contents developed for grasping the learning situation and process for each student is described, and the learning process and the result-aggregation server are introduced to show the above-mentioned concept. We present the software to analyze the state transition information acquired from teaching aids with IoT. The analysis of the information sent from the teaching aids reveals clear-cut effectiveness.

In this research, we devised a learning approach to increase the student recognition that problem-solving in learning includes the spiral development of four processes: motivation of creation, design and plan, production and nurturing evaluation of accomplishment. Therefore, a straw bridge contest was conducted twice in the PDCA cycle during the initial stage of technology education. Students gained experience in spiral learning development using the same subject matter simultaneously. First, students found the problem of the straw bridge designed and manufactured; second, they were able to solve the problem fast based on the results of their analysis and make a stronger product in the second attempt in a shorter time. In addition, by analyzing the number and type of truss structures in the first and second attempts, it was found that students' work evolved into a product of increased strength quantitatively and that the proposed spiral learning development was useful. Consequently, students were able to recognize that problem-solving in learning was a cycle comprising four processes. In addition, the teacher was able to obtain suggestions, which was necessary for improving the learning curriculum according to students' problem-solving ability.

As a teaching aid that can be used in learning about the mechanism and features of information systems in a practical and experiential way, a simulated POS (Point of sales) system has been developed, and its effectiveness has been confirmed in previous study. Furthermore, “the activities to solve issues in daily life and society through programing interactively contents using the network" were established in technology education in the Japanese middle school course of study in 2017. Therefore, our goal was to develop a simulated POS system teaching aid that could be used in teaching about the mechanism and features of information systems and program the recommended system. We organized classes for middle school second graders and evaluated the developed teaching aid. The questionnaire results confirmed that the developed teaching aid was interesting and easy to understand and that it was possible to think about the program from data analysis, understand the concept of the recommended system, and consider the utilization of the information systems. In addition, we asked the technology education teachers to test the developed teaching aid in teacher training, where it was also confirmed that the developed teaching aid corresponded to the course of study and was applicable in class.

In this study, we developed a handling arm system for use in teaching students how to control the movement direction and speed of pneumatic cylinders. The handling arm gives a simple structure with a rotary joint that uses the power transmitted by a rack and pinion with a pneumatic cylinder as the drive source, a prismatic joint with a guided thin pneumatic cylinder as the drive source, and an end effector with a thin pneumatic chuck as the drive source. More specifically, first we confirmed the performance of the system during automatic control, and found that it could perform handling work in which beverage cans were transferred from one location to another. Next, we evaluated the system from the perspective of an instructor regarding its use as teaching material during actual training from basic control to actual wiring and operation. We found that it not only spurred curiosity and interest during training, but also allowed students to gain hands-on knowledge of flow control valves and directional control valves, suggesting that the system could be effective teaching materials.