Engineering education toward the 21st Century must be taken into account social requirements and market needs for achieving a proper balance in training in scientif-ic and professional course, resulting in high-quality engineering education by consid-ering public welfare, human being, and environmental issues of sustaining our Earth. This paper focuses on examining and enhancing the engineering education system as a new strategy to stimulate development of remarkable improvement in the education programs that synthesize effective concepts and features of socially responsible engi-neering education. Several requirements are also proposed to enhance and guarantee the high-quality engineering education for the 21st Century.

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Course evaluation on "Mechanical Design I", instructed by the author of this arti-cle, is compared with the previous one on "Mechanical Design II" opened for seniors. The evaluated results on the both classes can be considered to be almost same within the limit of expected accuracy. However, it is found in this study that the results are influenced by other subjects instructed before by faculty members in the same depart-ment. Thus, this article discusses the practical meaning of such course evaluation that has been introduced gradually in Japanese universities. This study concludes that the pedagogical environment in Japan needs to be changed from formality to practicality.

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The importance and necessity of accreditation of engineering education is not generally well understood in Japan. This paper presents briefly the present situation and outlook of the accreditation system in abroad, followed by discussion of its necessity and problems. Namely, it is necessary for: (1) inducing competition between universities, promoting the distribution of real information on engineering education, and increasing the number of qualified evaluators, in order to improve the engineering education. (2) helping graduates to get jobs in aboard, (3) facilitating students to study in abroad, (4) helping graduates to get professional engineering qualifications and licenses, (5) gathering better foreign students, (6) facilitating international mutual recognition of engineering qualifications and licenses. The author expects that the problems which could be caused by the accreditation can be avoided by adopting a proper system and careful management. Further, it is hoped to establish an international sys-tem for mutual assessment of engineering education in order to improve the education worldwide.

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This paper describes a project-styled practice carrying on at Yamagata College of Industry & Technology since 1996. This is a trial to train students to be practical engineers during short period. Main purpose of this practice is to give students an opportunity (1) to promote motivation of their study and (2) to try their technical knowledge and skill in the development of a practical system. In this practice, students work together for building up a whole system in a half year. Evaluations of this practice based on a questionnaire indicate that (1) students are interested in this style of practice and (2) students can certainly acquire practical knowledge and skill.

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Demonstrations and teaching materials to show the realistic image and phenomena introduce marvelous effects in lectures on science and technology. A number of endeavors to establish high quality lectures have been made in Tokyo Institute of Technology. Some of the examples were appeared in the periodical: "Tokyo Institute of Technology Chronicle", No.318(1998). With permission of the committee of public relation in the institute, we revised the article to describe more details and report here.

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It's very important for the coming mechanical engineers to have synthesizing ability as well as analyzing ability. As a subject to induce the ability for synthesis of students, we prepare a Seminar for the students of mechanical engineering.
In this course, 8 engineers working in the neighborhood who graduated from our Dept, teach students on how to use the mechanical engineering to solve actual problems in practice. The second aim of this course is to motivate the students to study mechanical engineering by the graduates. And the third is to broaden the engineering sense of students through hearing many engineers' points of view.
While it's difficult for third-year students to understand technical knowledge in real world, many of them took interests in their seniors' lectures. Second, we have sufficiently accomplished our purpose of filling up practical education for future engineers, because those experts have educated the students how to use and contribute basic mechanical studies in actual technology. Furthermore, some students are attracted to rural industries in their own technological interests, and so on.
This report is one of the self-evaluations for the Seminar for Mechanical Engineers.

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