The educational institutions have come to be requested to open their functions widely, to deepen the technological and personnel exchange with the regions, and to contribute to the society as the open schools along with the diversification of the society. The public colleges of technology are located in large cities where a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises are, which are suffering to the recent recession. Now is the time public colleges of technology, the industry, and government should cooperate to train people for the future and to support the small and medium-sized enterprises. So We made the research on the current state of the above-mentioned cooperation and the future view nationwide. There are a lot of attractive activities according to the circumstance of each local government.

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Welfare is a crucial problem for our country, where we are facing an aged society. The paper reports a case study of the development and experimental results of a power assist wheelchair that we developed as a student project, which motivates the control engineering students to learn about the welfare problem. In the initial stage of the experiment, the students learned about the associated problems for the disabled people operating wheelchairs, and came up with the specifications accordingly. The equipment includes sensors for inclinations of the road that a wheelchair is traveling and an estimator for the operator's weight. Combined with the controller, the wheelchair has attained the ability to adjust auxiliary forces without interference with the operator manipulations, eliminating the need for extra operator's force when operating on a ramp. Besides, it has good characteristics for traveling straight even on the road slanted in the transverse direction. The project has proved to be effective for students to learn about engineering roles in the welfare problem.

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Recently, student teams in Yumekobo, Factory for Dreams and Ideas, obtain remarkable results in various domestic and world championships. The educational system in Yumekobo attracts attention very much among the persons who engage in the educational system reform in many universities. Yumekobo is also not the place that only learns knowledge and skill but the place of character building. Students develop their good character, which include independence, creativity, morals, teamwork, international nature and so on. As an example, authors describe also in it practice of the concrete education, the state of arts and a future design in a student team that won the 2nd place at the RoboCup-2002 world chamnionship.

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The basic scientific and technological knowledge and experience that incoming students of our university possess have been inspected. It was clearly shown that such knowledge was based not on experience but on desk work. Usually students had not had the opportunity to obtain such knowledge in actual situations, and many students lost interest in studying engineering. In order to improve this situation and produce creativity in students, we developed a laboratory course to provide fundamental scientific and technical experience to our freshmen. This academic year(2002), over 340 students belong to four different departments will take this new course. The preliminary outcomes will be reported.

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Engineering education is changing from education mainly on absorption of knowledge and acquisition of skill to education mainly on engineering design which does a realization under given constraint conditions and formation of concept which presents design objective. Such education programs are named "Problem-Based Learning", which are widely used in engineering education. As a trial, the PBL program using IT and study model was carried out for students in structural engineering laboratory of Kanazawa Inst. of Technology, and the results were worthwhile.

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The objectives of Engineering Design Education to freshmen at Kanazawa Institute of Technology are to provide students not only with superior technical capabilities, but also to enable them to identify and solve ill-defined and open-ended problems, to generate a set of distinct and creative concepts and to implement the Engineering Design Process, while working as a team. Most of freshman students have never had chance to design and build anything, because the Japanese high school educational system emphasizes knowledge acquisition and memorization with little consideration for open-ended problem solving. Therefore, an introductory design project has been introduced before tackling with an ill-defined and open-ended problem. The paper presents an overview and lessons learned from the introductory design project in Engineering Design Course.

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The engineer education on ethics is an important component of the JABEE's examination for accreditation. The importance of engineering ethics seems to be growing increasingly as the basic education in educating engineers. At present, there are few universities that have a course in engineering ethics, since there are few teachers who can teach the subject and the research in teaching materials for the subject is lacking. We had three trial classes in engineering ethics. We also established research group on engineering ethics and began research on teaching materials. In the present paper, we indicate the details of the classes, some problems clarified in the classes and some research results on teaching materials for engineering ethics.

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The graduation work has several effects on education of students in terms of setting of the research subject, resolving the subject, completing the thesis, practice of oral presentation and so on, under close supervising of faculty stuff. However, evaluations of the progress of students in the graduation work are not easy because the work is performed with a single or a small group of teachers. The authors had designed an evaluation system for achievement of the graduation work for each student in authors' department. The evaluation was done by the resenting student him-self and several teachers at the final presentation done in Feb. 2002. We found that each student has different own characters but these characters become hidden by taking statistical average over a group of students. For new senior students in new academics year, we will evaluate the achievement two times in the middle and the final of the graduation work. More accurate results will be obtained by increasing number of the evaluation.

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Automatic Control Theory which belongs to basic engineering for supporting broad technical fields and which is fundamentally practical science is considered to be generally complicated field as it has actually lots of multiple formulas with no unit. Though "weak subject awareness" has existed among in-house engineers before, it becomes further more conspicuous now since the age "problems can be solved without thinking by computers" has come now. This thesis reports practical training of engineers challenging "weak subject awareness" and trying to think, experience and to be impressed on his or her own.

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