Small-scale robot design competition was exhibited in some scientific events for kids. The children made SUMO robots with their own ideas to win a tournament. In order to exhibit repeatedly, each cycle was finished in approximate an hour, and 8 participants who were divided into 4 teams could be played simultaneously. At first, the kids built a model robot following the demonstration by a teaching student. Then, they were allowed to improve their robot to defeat the rivals in the game. It was found that if the activity of the kids was controlled adequately, we could avoid not only confusing the competition but missing many parts. Moreover, they also experienced great fun of the creative activity.

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Recently, the high school courses of the newly registered students in the departiment of technology are diversified highly. Uniform education in the institute has harmful effect, such as a great difference of the student understanding. The preentrance correspondence lecture was held at the institute for the successful high school student up to the entrance into the institute. This attempt could build up a closer cooperation with the high school and the institute. The contents of the lecture is related to the basic engineering education and all teachers instructed the students individually. After that, the institute could grasp the academic attainment of the sutudents. The lecture raised a student motivation to the engineering education and a tense atmosphere of the high school education.

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We have undertook the research and writing of graduation thesis based on collaboration with an industrial high school that has an operational relationship with our university. Theprocess of this collaborative study educationally stimulated the participating university students to develop individuality and positivity. Through this study, the high school students were also motivated to learn the process of problem solving.

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It is necessary to think about the presentation education method by the computer-based presentation in the National College of Technolgy. The students experience a lot of presentations by the experiments and the practices of five years, and are learning the method of presentation. In this paper, we report on the example of the curriculum in the contents of the experiments by the curriculum and the cooperation of the method of presentation. Moreover, we report on the evaluation of the presentation education in the engineering experiments by the questionnaire of the students.

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PBL (Problem Based Learning) is an educational program for the students where actual product and problems actually occurred in the industries are selected as a theme. In this program, the experience through skill up of the individuals and team working are most emphasized, and the aim of the education is meant for initiating and cultivating the attitude of thinking by themselves and defining problems which leads to competence. We start investigating PBL activities in USA, Sweden and Denmark starting from 1998. In this paper, PBL activities conducted in USA and European universities and colleges are reported focusing on the idea of education, supporting system, features and future issues etc.

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A newly introduced Engineering-Design Program "Kikai-Kinou-Tankyu" (Looking into Mechanical Systems) and the reactions from students and faculty members to the new program are reported here. On the scheme, the students are roughly divided into 30 groups, and each group, which consists of two or three students, is assigned a member of the department faculty. The program emphasizes the importance of each student's self-propelled involvement both in fixing a project theme and in carrying it out. Therefore, faculty members only play a secondary role as a professional adviser to his students. At the end of the term, student groups are required to present their results to the other groups. Overall responses from students and faculty members about the scheme so far have been quite positive.

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Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is introduced to freshmen and engineering education in Hokkaido University. Research and Development Group of Engineering Education Programs was established in 1999 at the Faculty of Engineering to promote the PBL. As the results, 18 PBL courses were provided in 2000 by members of faculty of engineering, and 22 courses in 2001. They included 2 or 4 courses for freshmen education respectively. The outcomes assessments of the courses showed an intensive growth of the creative abilities of the students and much students' satisfaction by taking the courses. For farther promotion, it is advised that it is important to secure the abundant seminar spaces and good teaching assistants, and to reserve sufficient time for the program.

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The training seminar of production technology is important and one of the central subjects in the department of mechanical engineering. In order to develop the creativity, new seminar style of the production technology has been carried out since 1993 in Hachinohe national college of technology. The fourth graders design and draw a plan of a mechanical gear due to given specifications in curriculum of a creative design, and at the next year the third graders make a product based on it's plan in the curriculum of a workmanship training. This report describes the educational object, the selection of the exercise and the design and manufacture of the mini steam locomotive in the new training seminar of production technology.

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This paper is the case report of the trial lesson project which planned for the 5th grade students of mechanical engineering department of Tomakomai National College of Technology. The trial lesson simulates the technical development in the company which carried out. The target of this project is having students learn the fundamental skill as technology companies. There are the following features in the engineering education stated in this paper. (1)Students take the lead and manage a lesson. (2)A lesson progresses by information dispatch from a student side. From the result of this project, the improving point of the curriculum of this department of school mechanical engineering is guessed.

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Japan has been introducing overseas technology rapidly since the Meiji Era. At the same time Japan's own education system in architecture was created in Japan, and has been inherited. The characteristics of the system are that in the four-years curriculum for a faculty, art education (designs, plans and histories) and technology education (structures, environment and execution) are carried out simultaneously. While this educational system is expected to satisfy concerns for the total design of both space and structure in architecture, students cannot be expected to achieve satisfactory results through academic education alone. The students who will become structural engineers need to learn both a fascination for "making things" and the "close connection of spaces and structures" with great interest. In an attempt to stimulate the creative thinking of undergraduate and graduate students, the Dome Competition has been held on the university campus. Mini-domes were built by the students for the purpose of promoting ability and interest in the design of space and structure. A judging committee selected some of the domes, built by the students in a single day, as excellent examples of image or concept, system, detail and construction.

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We have been sharing Project Based Learning design class between Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology and Stanford University with Toyota Motor as a corporate partner since 1998. This paper describes our experience of remotely distributed team working in design across the national boundaries and what were the difficulties there and how we could overcome these issues. Although distance learning is getting very popular these days, the contents of most of these systems are nothing but lectures in classroom teaching. And the technologies to support team working for project based learning are still very few. Our experience would serve to provide a basis for developing an environment for supporting team working for project based learning between remotely distributed members.

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Recently various types of design projects have been introduced in the engineering education. The purpose of the design projects has been discussed extensively. However, it is quite rare to successfully exemplify students the concrete objectives of their final attainments according to the purpose. The author introduced the Project-based Learning (PBL) in students' graduation research program. In this project, he investigated indispensable competency for the professional engineers and gave students concrete objectives. Students were required to understand their final attainments of their tasks in the first part of the session and give self-outcomes assessments by themselves at the end of the PBL. As the result of this investigation, the following were obtained. The clarification of their learning objectives gave them clearer future vision of being engineers. And this PBL program brought incidental outcomes in the students' self-evaluation: the evaluation for appropriateness and quality of each group's task program or the whole research program was obtained as well as individual student's evaluation for the concerned task.

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New engineering design courses called Engineering Design I and II have been implemented to approximately 2000 sophomore students as part of a new curriculum launched in 1995 at Kanazawa Institute of Technology. Each course requires students to participate in a team project from the problem discovery stage to the concept design stage to enhance the student's ability to solve open-ended and ill-structured problem. These two courses have been taught through 4 years providing students with an opportunity to experience and implement the design process successfully. At a same time, students exhibited an increase of creativity, communication ability etc. in these courses.

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PBL (Problem Based Learning) is an educational program for the students where actual products and problems actually occurring in the industries are selected as themes. In this program, experience through skill improvement of the individual students and teamwork are emphasized most. The aim of the education program is to initiate and cultivate in the students an attitude of thinking by themselves and defining problems, which leads to competence. In this paper, the result of a PBL program for first year graduate students is reported. Vibration suppression of a small size centrifuge for biochemistry use was the project theme. Students managed the whole project starting from problem definition to making proposals for improvement.

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It is important to combine theory and practice in engineering education. To assist theoretical learning, many Web-based textbooks and computer-assisted learning tools have been developed. However, there are very few systems that allow the remotely located user to conduct a laboratory experiment, which is very essential in engineering education. We develop a remote laboratory system using high-speed networks between Japan and the U.S., and demonstrate its usefulness.

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Author teaches engineering subject in Kanazawa Institute of Technology based on the concept that a teaching subject is regarded as a project and teaching is cooperation work with student. Under a teaching policy given by author, each student behaves toward his learning object in each learning step determined in a syllabus. At each learning step, author checks his achievement degree and then feeds its result back to him. Then, re-estimation of learning object and further action are taken by teacher and student, if necessary. This sequence is repeated until final learning object is achieved. Author calls this teaching method [Teaching method introduced a concept of project management]. As a result of applying this method to the above subject, almost all students enabled to achieve their learning object.

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This paper reports on a technique for improving presentation skills during the education of the pre-design process to first year students. Each student was asked to investigate roots of interesting invention in mechanical engineering in a group with two other students. Each student was able to learn the process of invention and design through this investigation. It was expected that use of this technique would improve the pre-design, team working, report writing and presentation skills of each student. The results showed that presentation skills were significantly improved by the introduction of the new evaluation method.

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A subject for a third grade students that turning three-dimensional CAD models into the molding model by using a rapid prototyping system was enforced as a theme of the machine design and drawing practice. Subject's contents, staff's workload and cost were examined in advance based on the quantitative data. As a result, the practice could be carried out effectively toward 90 students in the limited period. An examination has been discussed about the effect of this subject from the classification of the modeling method, the reference object for the models, the editing time when CAD was used and a questionnaire result by the students.

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Structural mechanics is considered as one of the most difficult studies for students in civil engineering, though it is compulsory for designing safe structures. This paper presents a set of computer software for virtual experiments of structural mechanics. Such experiments coupled with conventional lectures improve understanding the basic notions of equilibrium. Also, competitive desktop experiments such as a strong-bridge-construction contest are effective to strengthen the knowledge of students at the end of a semester.

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By the diversification of the scholastic attainments of entering students, the educational improvement in Japanese universities poses the very important issue. This paper considers the educational effects by publishing lecture support data on homepage to help students understand the lecture better. It is shown that such use of HP and some reforming the lecture methods are certainly useful for the educational improvement in such aspects as decrease of dropout rates, increase of attendance rates, and the enhancement of students' motivations.

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The course of study, which put stress upon fostering students' creativity, has been conducted since April, 2002. Whether students will succeed in developing their creativity through making something themselves, freed from learning simply for passing the entrance examinations, or they will lack their motivation to learning, given more free time, depends upon teachers' constant and steady efforts. IT, which stands for Information Technology, has been evidently spread in schools and homes throughout this country. Under this situation, we have suggested practicing the Active Learning classes by use of multimedia, which have proved to be successful. We have already reported on the fruitful results of 'Doing Stage' and 'Checking Stage', which make up the three stages of Active Learning classes with the aid of multimedia, along with the first stage 'Planning Stage'. This thesis deals with analysis of problems in the Planning Stage from both obtained data and questionnaires of students. Here we report on the system of applying multimedia to the aim of setting up and maintaining students' motivation.

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A new assessment method based on the cognitive-science was designed in order to know the degree of understanding of students after a laboratory class, where they used an ion-accelerator which was unusually large and complex as a laboratory equipment for them. Each student drew a block diagram model of the accelerator system with some comments on a sheet of A4 sized paper, and presented it in front of the teacher within a few minutes. The analysis of all collected sheets and their presentations showed that unexpectedly clear recognition images formed in their brains were obtained as an abstract form. It can be concluded that there were many merits for both teacher and students in the present method. For the teacher, it revealed the students' recognition models directly ; insufficient recognition and misconceptions in some students were found and corrected; students' abilities of understanding, abstraction, and presentation were objectively assessed; from these, useful information for the revision of the laboratory course was drawn. The students also received nice benefits in the construction of their correct accelerator models and in development of the presentation skill. The method is applicable to conventional lecture-oriented classes.

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