“Nihon Koujin Club” and its activities are reviewed with reference to social cooperation and continuing development of engineers. Nihon Koujin Club was the first Japanese association of working-engineers (“koujin” in Japanese) established in 1920. At one time, more than 5000 engineers from various fields of engineering registered as the member of the club. Nihon-Koujin Club carried out various activities such as examinations to qualify professional engineers, enlightening activities for engineers' ethics and improvement of working conditions and so on. Proposals to governments were sometimes made one of which was that on engineering education. When it started, Nihon Koujin Club had an ambition to exchange information together with international counterparts such as The British Association of Scientific Worker. Unfortunately the direction of the club has deviated from its original purpose due to historical circumstances of nationalism of those days. Nevertheless its activities could be appreciated as an early stage of movement of engineers in Japan. The modern activities related to social cooperation or continuing development of engineers can be traced back to the activities of Nihon Koujin Club.

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Engineering education is composed of five components, the idea what engineering education ought to be, the knowledge in engineering fields, those who learn engineering, those who teach engineering and the stakeholders in engineering issues. The characteristics of all these five components are changing with the times. When we consider the engineering education for the next era, we should analyze the changes of all five components. Especially the knowledge and tools in engineering fields has been expanding, and advanced science and technology is casting partly a dark shadow on the modern convenient life. Moral rules or ethics for developing new products and engineering systems are now regarded as most important in engineering fields. All those who take the responsibility for engineering education should understand the change of all components in engineering education and have a clear grasp of the essence of engineering for sustainable society.

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A Project-Based Learning (PBL) program has been examined for the 2nd year students who spontaneously set the project themes. The questionnaires to the same students who had taken the PBL course were carried out just after promotion to the 4th year as well as just before graduation. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the PBL program and the usefulness of the PBL continuous assessment of the outcomes.

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The beginning lecture and the improvement of “Experiments in Innovative Chemistry” as an entry subjects in the Department of Biochemistry and Applied Chemistry at Kurume National College of Technology has been performed for recent three years. Every experiment was selected to sustain the young student's interest. The questionnaires were performed after first two year's programs were finished, and some of projects were improved. This subject has a good reputation for students and teachers, and seems to be very effective for the first year students of national college of technology.

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At Sasebo National College of Technology, a seminar called “Practice of Total Creative Engineering” is newly designed for advanced engineering course. This is a problem-based learning activity and its goals are to let students develop their creative abilities and cooperative techniques, and to let them improve their presentation skills. In this activity, students make up groups of three or four with different specialized fields ; mechanical, electrical and electronic, chemical and biological. Student's goal is to produce a microcomputer-controlled machine to meet the pre-assigned requirements. As the final stage, students are to make presentations on their ideas and to demonstrate how their machine can really work. Based on the comments from students and teachers, the possibility of this trial is discussed.

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Electromagnetism is the base of electrical engineering, however, it is one of the most difficult subjects to learn. The small experiments which show the principles of electricity visibly are useful technique to promote these comprehension. For classroom experimental materials to learn basic electromagnetism, we developed rotating magnetic field visualizer, gravity-use generators, simple motors, and electric-field visualizer. We report how we visualized the principles of motors and generators in classroom experiments. In particular, we discuss in detail how to visualize the mechanism of very simple motors. We have been demonstrating the motors in children science classes conducted all over Japan. We developed these experimental materials, and we achieved remarkable results using these materials in the electromagnetism class.

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The class through the communication with a community was performed as a creative education to the students in civil engineering course. The lesson consists of the subject investigation and its presentation. Not only teachers and students but also people living in the area of the university neighborhood participate in the presentation. Since the object of civil engineering is very wide, the civil engineers with fair judgment are required. Moreover, the importance of the preservation of environment has been recognized, and therefore, the study menu related to the role of a local community is desirable to be offered to the students in civil engineering course.

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Recently, it gradually becomes a serious problem that the number of children, who dislike the course of science and mathematics/the course of Science and technology, has been getting greater and greater. In such situation, it is quite important that the students of school (faculty) of engineering contribute to the regional community and the elementary/secondary educations by utilizing the subject matters, which they have been learning in the university. Especially, the development of teaching materials by taking advantage of the idea “Monodukuri” and the practiced classes using them occupy the very important positions when we construct the curriculum of science education in the future.

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