In this paper, a description of what the American Society for Engineering Education is doing to transform engineering education in the United States and the world is presented. With the many challenging and complex problems the world faces, it is critical that educational institutions are producing talented, innovative engineering graduates to improve the quality of life throughout the world. The paper begins with some background information on the American Society of Engineering Education and continues with a discussion of several activities aimed at transforming engineering education.

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A global world has recently expedited the international collaboration and network among engineering education societies including their scholars. The current issues of engineering education societies have been raised and discussed and those are various topics such as accreditation issues, current trends in engineering and technology education, government policies, innovations, program and project based learning, social sciences in engineering and technology education, university-industry joint programs, human resource development and engineering education, university linkage with K-12, role of engineering education in sustainable development, and the others. Among the variety of issues and topics, the hottest topic is relating to “innovations” of engineering education system. The innovative direction of engineering education in Korea has been reported along with that of USA, whose role has been one of major parts in innovation for the global engineering education system. The recent survey by IFEES (International Federation of Engineering Education Societies) has also been analyzed to consider the current three biggest challenges of global engineering education societies.

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There has been rapid development in Southeast Asian countries in the past decades. Continuing engineering education and professional development play key roles in the advance of engineering know-how in the rapidly changing technological world especially in Southeast Asia. This paper intends to provide an overview of continuing professional development activities in a number of Southeast Asian countries. The introduction of compulsory professional development hours for the renewal of professional engineering registration in Singapore and some of its neighboring countries will facilitate further rapid development in continuing engineering education. Examples on successful cases and models will be illustrated. The improvements on some existing programs will also be highlighted.

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The situation surrounding Japanese universities and colleges is very severe. We must challenge to give solutions for many educational problems such as guarantee of educational quality, strict evaluation of educational achievement and so on. Kobe University established the university vision called as “Vision 2015” in 2006. According to this vision, various kinds of educational program have been running during last few years to elevate the level of education. This article covers descriptions about several new programs related with liberal arts and engineering education. The author hopes that this article is informative for engineering education.

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Children who want to study science & technology are decreasing continuously in Japan. This phenomenon is so called “Rika Banare” meaning literally science apart. Then, the number of students aiming at being engineers is decreasing. This will be a threat for Japanese industry. Many science & technology events are being held everywhere in Japan to overcome Rika Banare. However, most of them leave no sustainable influence over the students who reach to high school age. The reason why Rika Banare takes place is discussed. Then, it is insisted that the promotion of the attractive features of engineering career is important as well as improvement of the education system. In this article, eight proposals to stop Rika Banare are presented. Five of them are related to education system and the rest three to the improvement of social status of engineers.

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We report an outline of two of our robots which participated in “Kosen Robocon” in 2006 : “Caterpillar Robot” and “Jump-roping Robot.” In this report we show particularly an educational approach toward the manufacturing education in the Robot Contest. The robots made by our students participated not only in the Robot Contest, but in several local events. Through these events, our students could find some mechanical problems of the robots, solve them, and check the robots′ working in a demonstration trial. Also, they got practical technique that they could repair their robots by themselves in accidental troubles. Consequently, we gave our students a kind of technological capability in the manufacturing education.

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In order to get students in engineering courses to acquire a good command of English, a coursework named “English for Engineers” has been offered to senior students in the department of mechanical engineering of Mie University. The authors place much value on the coursework from the viewpoints of acquiring the ability of (1) accurate pronunciations in accordance with phonetic symbols, and (2) a series of translations from a word-for-word translation to a free one. To make the coursework more effective, the authors have developed an e-learning system. The system supports teachers in engineering departments who are normally non-professionals in English education. The results showed that the proposed system is effective for comprehending the importance on the above-mentioned two viewpoints.

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The stereo visualized animation contents have not been spread on the domain of education because of the difficulties and high cost of making that. On this study, we proposed an easy and low cost method of the stereo visualization for 3DCG-Animation. The easy and low cost stereo visualization system is composed of two ordinary liquid crystal projectors, a personal computer and a silver screen. In this paper, by using this method, we developed a stereo visualized 3DCG-animation content of 4 stroke cycle gasoline engine and used the content for the class of the machining practice exercise. Moreover, the learning effect of the content was examined with the questionnaire. The result of questionnaire showed that the stereo visualized 3DCG animation content was very helpful to understand the mechanism of engine.

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The Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) conducts two Twinning Programs. One is Malaysian Twinning Program, which is conducted in cooperation with 15 Japanese universities, and has SIT as its organizing member. The other is Hybrid Twinning Program, which is conducted with partner foreign universities, and is a graduate study program combining Masters and Doctoral programs. Two important reasons for conducting these twinning programs are to increase the number of foreign students studying in Japan and to promote friendly relations with various Asian countries. Twinning program is effective in enrolling students early and in lowering the cost of foreign study. Japanese students benefit too from good influence of interaction with students having a different culture and customs.

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The paper looked at students in the construction department for three years in 2000 to 2003, and examines the relation between the students′ results and the following factors: “Subjects they are good/bad at at high school” , “Types of entrance exam” and “Small-scale classes at the university” , the classes that are divided into small groups in order to improve the effectiveness of the education for basic specialized subjects, using surveys and multiple regression analysis. The result of this study is as follows : (1) The students′ strongest subject is mathematics, the weakest is English ; (2) Physics, which is an important subject, has substantial effect on the evaluation especially of the subjects that are based on dynamics. However, whether the students′ have learnt physics or not at high school does not have substantial effect on their results after entering the university ; (3) Amongst the factors “Subjects they are good at” , “Subjects they are bad at” , “Types of entrance exam” , and “Small-scale classes” , the “Types of entrance exam” had the strongest link with the evaluation of results. For students learning civil-engineering, it was “Subjects they are good/bad at” , and for those learning architecture, it was “Small-scale classes” .

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“Point and file system” was tried for the student to participate in the class positively and to study independently by making a daily effort to a point. The relations among points, the attendance and examinations were clarified. The attendance situation has been improved as to introduce this system, and the result of the entire class has improved. Almost students felt attending the lecture independently, and they came to be seated only forward of the room. As a result, the atmosphere of the lecture will be improved compared with the last year. This system prevents the prints distributed at the class from getting scattered and lost, and is useful also for the study before the examinations.

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Tohoku University promotes the “REDEEM” project, which is a national project of Recurrent Education for the Development of Engineering Enhanced Medicine. This education system provides a curriculum for engineers who belong to bio-medical R&D. In Japan, most of industrial engineers have been excluded from systemized bio-medical education, while medical and co-medical personnel lack engineering education. This difference of backgrounds causes a discrepancy between medicine and engineering bringing difficulty in collaboration for development of medical equipments or drugs. In this project, we focus on the engineering side, and we try to develop and provide a bio-medical engineering course for engineers. In this paper, we report and discuss on the outline and the progress of the “REDEEM” project.

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This paper introduces a method of the engineering design education for college of technology mechanical engineering students. In order to teach the practical engineering design, the MIL-STD-499A process is adapted and improved upon for a Mechatronics hands-on lesson used as the MOT method. The educational results in five years indicate that knowledge of the engineering management is useful for college students in learning engineering design. Portfolio for lessons and the hypothesis method also have better effects on the understanding of the engineering specialty.

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The PDCA spiral up of the educational program has been carried out since the JABEE accreditation. Various questionnaires have been carried out for many students in order to produce the evidence. The totaling work needed very large human power. This paper describes that we introduced the OMR software, and attempted the efficiency improvement of the work. The method is cheap, because the mark sheet can be made in the plain paper printing. We also can use the general-purpose equipment for the totaling work. The mark sheet which the student wrote is read by the scanner. We check only error display in proportion to the filling up error. We could finish totaling work of the answer papers of about 420 persons in the 1 hour half. We were able to be intent on a general education to the student, because the human power was not needed for the totaling work.

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In the academic year 2004 Faculty of Environmental Studies in Hiroshima Institute of Technology stopped coordinating the mathematical classes by the placement tests, because a number of students found themselves mismatched to assigned classes. This was due to the diversifying types of entrance exams. Instead the mathematics classes are now coordinated by the students′ learning backgrounds. This paper presents the method of mathematics education based on class coordination by learners′ backgrounds and the annotation on the time-history of the students′ achievements for four years from the academic year 2004 to show the validity of this novel method of education for diversified students.

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The Education Center of Chiba Institute of Technology is taking a new approach to the introduction of liberal arts subjects commonly included in the curriculum of all departments through a newly established basic seminar, the Science of Snow Sports. Each faculty member has been working on setting up classes that cross the conventional boundaries of fields and disciplines and which are targeted at students of all faculties and departments. This paper describes the potential for teaching liberal arts and social science subjects to engineering students through the medium of sports science, based on actual experience gained via this new approach.

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A new attempt has been introduced in our department since the fiscal year 2005, which is based on our educational objectives, and summarized as: (i) Students discuss some topic related to the community and work on it incorporating fieldwork. (ii) They summarize the outcomes as multimedia contents, and deliver them via a web site. (iii) Through this program, the students obtain skills to cope with the community issues, to present them with multimedia techniques, and to broadcast the completed contents via the Internet. Educational evaluation by the students showed that this curriculum was interesting and satisfactory, and also they engaged in the program positively.

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The system safety has been being applied in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) ′s launch vehicle and satellite development projects. The engineering state of system safety has some room for improvement. Therefore, JAXA is continuously working for system safety improvement. The system safety engineer training course is the top priority for the improvement. This paper represents the practical training evaluation way using Kirkpatrick′s 4-level approach and the actual results in JAXA system safety engineer training course. Also this paper represents the importance of the engineer training evaluation as a part of PDCA cycle in the industry field.

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The new educational methods of engineering design have attempted to improve mechanical engineering education for graduate students in a way of the collaboration in education of engineer and designer. The education program is based on the lecture and practical exercises concerning the product design, and has engineering themes and design process themes, i.e. project management, QFD, TRIZ, robust design (Taguchi method) , ergonomics, usability, marketing, conception etc. At final exercise, all students were able to design new product related to their own research theme by applying learned knowledge and techniques. By the method of engineering design education, we have confirmed that graduate students are able to experience technological and creative interest.

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