Kanazawa Institute of Technology started education reform in 1995. In the education up to that time the emphasis was laid to cram knowledge to students rather than to let them apply such knowledge to make products. The main purpose of the education reform was to cultivate students' ability to acquire necessary knowledge and information to produce technical fruits. To attain this purpose first of all curricula were completely changed and new subject “Engineering Design” was developed. At the same time education supporting system to encourage students' after school activities was introduced. In the following authors describe the contents of “Engineering Design” together with the activities of “Factory for Dreams and Ideas” which was established to help students' creative activity at any time when they have spare time.

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Creative education cannot be achieved without the creative efforts by the teachers who teach the class. This paper describes what the creativity education means today from the point of view of the teachers who teach the fundamental creative engineering class. The assignments of the exercises in the class are derived from the creative efforts of the teaching staffs. This paper picks up some of the typical assignments of the exercises and shows what kinds of exercises are given to the students. Reviewing the results of these exercises, the paper discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the assignments in the classes for the further improvement in the next semester.

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Recently, internet has been made remarkable progress. This progress, however, gives rise to the lack of creative efforts. In these circumstances, we consider that manufacturing is significant in the development of our societies. From such a point of view, we began a trial of educational methodology that attaches great importance to the originality and creativity in the fields of our engineering education programs. For this purpose, we have started educational method in which the first graders learn fundamentals of engineering by hand-on experiments from 2005. The first graders can choose experimental subjects of each department and learn them. In this lecture, students can learn the engineering basis of each department by experience. Furthermore, students whose departments are not yet determined can select a department from experience of the lecture. In this paper, we report principal results of this educational method in detail.

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The Department of Control and Sysytems Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, has been focusing on creativity in its undergraduate education for more than 40 years. The current curriculum is featuring 2 RoboCon-style subjects, in which students are assigned to create original robots to attend a competition. One subject is offered for 2nd year students and its main objective is to activate their creativity. The other is for 3rd year sudents aiming at development of team creativity. In this paper, after introducing the concepts of the curriculum, the latter subject called “Creative Design of Control Systems” is described in detail. Its objectives, outlines, and various efforts to teach and to operate the class are explained taking the 2005 class as an example.

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Recently, as the technologies surrounding mechanical engineering have improved remarkably, the expectations for students who graduate from departments of mechanical engineering have increased. For example, in order to develop a mechatronics system, a student needs to integrate a wide variety of technologies, such as mechanical engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, and information technology. Therefore, from the perspective of educators, the current education system, which stresses expertizing each technology, should be replaced by an education system that stresses integrating multidisciplinary knowledge. In this paper, a trial education program for students of the department of mechanical engineering in our university, in which students are required to integrate multidisciplinary knowledge in order to develop a biologically-based robot, is described. Finally, the efficacy of the program is analyzed.

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This paper presents a program and its results for the education of students' creativity and manufacturing ability in the graduation research. In this program, every two or three students working as a group are required to design and make a Stirling engine their selves, which has to be able to run at least 10 minutes continuously. This program has been designed to stimulate the students' creativity through the planning and designing of the engine as well as through solving almost all problems encountered, and to train their manufacturing ability by creating all the working drawings with 2D/3D-CAD, predicting the engine's performances using thermodynamics, and manufacturing most of the parts needed. Details and results of this program for the recent 7 years are reported.

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This paper reported that the manufacturing education currently carried out at department of mechanical engineering in Kanazawa Institute of Technology. It is the feature of machine work and practical training to perform both the lecture of manufacturing technology and a manufacturing practical training dealing with the heat sink for model engine in parallel, while having a class. A student can experience directly the flow of the manufacturing which consists of a design, manufacture and evaluation of the heat sink. This experienced type class can be used for a student recognizing the necessity for technical knowledge. Moreover, it is effective for improvement in the motivation to study.

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The works of Toyota national college of technology gets excellent result on structural design competition (bridge contest) of national college design competition. This paper reports planning and making process of these works. As increase strength of the structures, it is important point the determination of structural type by numerical analysis and test, and precision of production and idea of joining. Second, it reports the curriculum of special items connection with excellent works.

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In a microcomputer design educational environment City-1, where individual junior student in Hiroshima city university designs and fabricates an original computer on an A4-board with field programmable gate array (FPGA) in 15 weeks every year, a new education theory known as “situated learning”, introduced by Lave and Wenger, has been applied successfully. The very first step is called way-in, which we have found very critical for the success of the whole learning. Instruction-issue-logic has been chosen as such way-in, because it is the central part of the superscalar microprocessors. In 2004, 16 out of 52 junior students were successful in bringing their original devices into their microprocessors. In 2005, a couple of the students contributed to a project named dynamically-reconfigurable-issue-logic (DRIL), which is an experiment to construct dynamically-reconfigurable-superscalar (DRSS) microprocessors which can control the energy efficiency in a single clock cycle.

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Creativity is the most fundamental keyword for engineers to solve the various problems in manufacturing products. This engineering “learning” cannot be achieved without the real experiences, especially by the teens who have the curiosity to know everything. New educational program has been innovated in Miyagi National College of Technology. This new curriculum started as “03C” in 2003. It involves two laboratories for mixed-departments type grouping, which intend to cultivate the creative ability for the 2nd year students in College Course and the 1st year students in Advanced Course as Engineering Design. This paper presents the trial of the new educational program on the cultivating creative ability designed for teen-agers, and discusses the processes in detail, results and further problems. This program will progress still more with continuous improvement of manufacturing subjects in cooperative with educational-industrial complex.

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The Department of Management of Industry and Technology, Graduate School of Engineering in Osaka University provides a new type of a leadership training program which took in an OJE (On the Job Education) method. The OJE is an autonomous education system from planning to problem solving through aggressive self-developments. This program composes of not only lectures and case studies, but also practical exercises for accumulating knowledge and experience in order to develop strong judgment and decisiveness of graduate students. The procedure of the activity, examples of the exercises and the educational effects are described in the paper.

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Tokyo Metropolitan University, Precision Engineering Department practiced a project-based class, namely the creative project, for the second year students from 2002 to 2005. In this class, students survey a given theme, define a problem, and propose a new product and project with its budget. Although this class does not include development of products, discussing what should be developed is an important factor in current design processes in accordance with customer needs. Moreover, creation, team working, and presentation are common to every engineering process. This paper introduces a framework of this class, and discusses the learning effects of students on the basis of the results of questionnaire.

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The purpose of this study is to document how students can be provided with a creative engineering education in collaboration with the local community. It is important for students to tackle the problems of local community. The involvement of young people, such as college students, in solving the problems of local communities will contribute to their revitalization. Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) created two introductory engineering design courses : Engineer Design I (ED I) and Engineer Design II (ED II). ED I is taught in the freshman year, and ED II is taught in the sophomore year. KIT started a collaborative project with Nonoichi Town, where KIT campus is located. Officials of Nonoichi Town supplied KIT students in ED II with real project themes, to which solutions were needed, in order to improve the quality of town life. The officials provided students with valuable information and practical advice. As a result, students were able to generate excellent and viable design solutions.

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The ICEE (Innovation Center for Engineering Education) was founded in April 2004 as an educational facility in the Faculty of Engineering of Tottori University. The ICEE plans the development and training of creative professionals in all fields of engineering through Project Based Learning (PBL) programs in collaboration with local enterprises. In this report, the outline and the educational effect of the education program are described. Through PBL programs, we can give problem finding and solving abilities, self-initiative and communicative skill to the students.

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This paper describes specific examples of environmental making for positively and continuous learning in design subject which are called the “Project Exercise” at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of The University of Tokushima. The purpose of the design subject is training of not only creativity but also information processing, problem solving, group working and presentations. The feature of the Project Exercise is to link with the robot contest. As a result, the training of the motive of the own learning and a continuous study habit is executed. The education effect is discussed from the execution example, the student questionnaire, and the comment form in 2004.

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Faculties at the Department of Production, Information and Systems Engineering at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology faces a problem how they can motivate their students who lack in substantial hands on experience of design and manufacture and let them understand the processes from design to manufacture. To overcome this difficulty, a Remote Laboratory system was developed using a Stirling engine by noting its simple structure and principle, with the aim of providing a student hands on experience. A student designs a connecting rod, and it is machined by a milling machine in the lab at a distance. The on-site lab attendant installs the connecting rod on the engine and conducts a trial run, which is viewed by the student via internet video at the remote location. Experiments demonstrated that the Remote Lab system will facilitate a student to understand the processes from design to manufacture.

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Experiments and exercises in electrical and electronics engineering of the college of technology are investigated for the motivation for studying the technical subjects. Hand-on exercises at the lower grade increase an interest of the students in the professional subjects of the electrical and electronic engineering. And they also motivate to obtain technical licenses such as the electric work specialist. Writing reports under the adequate correcting guidance consolidate the foundation for studying the experiments and exercises at the higher grade.

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We have been trying to heighten students' creativity at The Center for Innovation and Creativity Development by two ways. One is supporting their project activities, which are extracurricular and autonomous. We have expected students make their creativity higher by acting with project members in different grades and fields. The another is education for fresh students by PBL (Project Based Learning) courses which are opened as public lectures. In both of these attempts, we have tried to clarify the factors which are necessary for planning, because we have thought planning ability is essential for students to drive PBL. In this paper, we have reported how to measure abilities needed for planning and have discussed how to teach the way of making plans.

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By using the combined questionnaire system of the integrated and simplified questionnaires with the individualized and detail specified questionnaires, we can expect the improvement of the lectures both in the faculty organization and in the individuals. Since the results from the integrated questionnaires are highly correlated to the detailed questionnaires, the information in the detailed questionnaires is not so disturbed by integration and simplification.

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[in Japanese]

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The recent evaluation of education has emphasized what students have learned rather than what they have studied. Moreover, the students should have the environment where they can continuously grasp what they have mastered. In our college, we have developed the system using our intramural Web environment in order for students to grasp how far they have completed the educational objectives of our college. The students can input scores and learning results handed by teachers to the self-check system and can carry out self-evaluation based on it. The result-input and self-evaluation may be useful for the future learning. Our system also serves as an important tool for student guidance, because the system includes the mechanism in which the teachers can grasp learning situation of each student. We, so far without any malfunction, have operated the system smoothly since 2003. In addition, from the questionnaire investigation and the number accessed, we could find the students in the advanced engineering course have been using the system regularly, and that the second grade students have been using it to confirm if they have satisfied the qualification for completing the course. From their frequent use of the system, we could judge this system to be an important tool for the support of the students. In the future we would try to improve the system.

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We suggest “an educational system of supporting students”, which gets students to study and live their lives fully, and in this system, teachers know how students do their work, and give them useful advice. That is, students exercise self-introspection of the previous year and set their aims for next year in the form of questionnaires. They record individual data from these works. If this system would be introduced at the university every year, the educational effects on students would improve.

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