The indoor flight contest for students has been organized. The main purpose of the contest is to promote aeronautical education in universities and colleges. Each team composed of five students designs, builds and flies indoor model planes by themselves. There are fixed wing and air ship divisions, in which each plane is controlled by radio controller and equips a small wireless micro video camera. We introduced a special rule, i.e., a plane′s weight must be less than 150 gram and a air ship′s length must be less than 1.5 meter. The score is calculated by combining the flight time, the accuracy of recognized image, and the allowance to the weight or size limit. The contest has been held annually since 2006. The number of participants is increasing and three foreign teams were joined to our contest. We will introduce the rule of the contest and results and will summarize lessons learned to scope the future development

View full abstract

Although Japan professes to be a scientific and technological country, more and more students have refused to apply to departments of engineering. From fiscal year 1992 through fiscal year 2008 the number of university applicants dropped to 71.6%. The number of applicants for engineering departments dropped to 61.1%, which is sharper than the decline in the number of total applicants. Among all faculties of national and public universities, engineering departments (first stage of individual exam) have the lowest difficulty level. Almost half of the engineering departments in national and public universities allow more than 50% of their applicants to pass the exam. The gap in difficulty level of entrance examinations between topnotch national universities and rural public universities has been expanding. The difficulty of entrance examination of medical technology departments is much higher than that of engineering ones. However, high-performing students have been enrolling in medical technology departments. For private universities, the gap in the number of engineering applicants between major metropolitan universities and rural ones has become considerable. Almost half of the high school teachers have realized the tendency of students' shying away from engineering departments. The contents of learning of engineering departments are too segmentalzed to understand, which makes it difficult for students to get an image of what they can do in their future after graduation. It is crucial for engineering departments to offer easy-to-understand information on future occupations to junior high students and high school students.

View full abstract

It is generally known that many young Japanese are moving away from the Engineering. In the Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokushima, “Science Summer Festival in Tokushima” was started in 1997 in order to increase young persons, who are interested in the Engineering, and marks its 12th anniversary in 2008. In the festival, the main theme is “Let′s experience science together” and various creative entertainments, which are operated through collaboration between industry, educational institutions and the administration in Tokushima Prefecture, are opened. Since first-grade students, who are expected to join the festival as a first-grade in an elementary school in 1997, were entered in the Faculty of Engineering in 2008, the effect of the festival on their motive for the entrance to the Faculty of the Engineering has been examined. In the present paper, the present situation of “Science Summer Festival in Tokushima” and the results of the examinations are described.

View full abstract

A number of students, showing less interest in science and technology, are in current increasing in many advanced countries as well as in Japan. This trend results in lack of engineering design ability for lower grade student of engineering course. To improve this developing attractive teaching material is inevitable. In this study, a woodwork violin making project is newly proposed. Students can learn the concept of what manufacturing processes are. The advantageous points of this project is as follows; short time until project completion, evaluation of instrument sounds in terms of both sensual and technological methods, and studying modern evaluation method of sound by means of FFT.

View full abstract

It is often pointed out that Japanese language skills of students are poor. The problem is related to logical thinking. The author manufactured a notebook by way of trial in order to improve abilities of thinking logically of students and made approximately 100 students use trial products in an omnibus lecture. In addition, the author had each instructor compile one page of contents of a lecture and tried to evaluate logical thinking power of students by comparing their notebooks with ones of instructors. This new evaluation method can be applied to various lectures, because the evaluation result has not depended on departments and grades of students.

View full abstract

The ability to evaluate something vague which is, for example, originality can be regarded as one of important elements which constitute the ability to make plans. The author has made use of cooperative activities in which every member undertakes each stage of a plan-do-check-cycle in order to develop training methods and evaluating methods of evaluating ability. The members of a CHECK team evaluated activities of a PLAN team and a DO team. The author tried to grasp the abilities of the members of a CHECK team by analyzing results of the evaluation. In addition, the author have made some teachers evaluate a sample in order to study the accuracy of criteria and extracted some challenges.

View full abstract

Kanazawa Institute of Technology established Engineering Foundations Education Center in 2000 to cope with lowering academic ability of Math. and Science of freshmen and to improve the quality of engineering foundations education. Since then, many learning support programs have been developed for independent and voluntary learning of the students. The effects of learning support programs are reported here and their future development is proposed to support the distinguish and dynamic engineering education.

View full abstract

The age of virtually free admission to colleges has come true in Japan these days due to the decreasing population of the young generation. That has caused various kinds of unpredictable problems and confusion in the educational scene in colleges. Our college was not the exception either, and after the term exam in the first semester of the year 2006 was over, we faced a serious situation, that is, about 55% of the first-year students could earn only less than 20 credits. Therefore, we were urged to take several measures, both urgent and lasting, to improve the situation thereafter, and we were able to escape the worst. In this article we give a general view of the situation and the measures we took, and try to inspect them. Through this work we would like to look for a clue for further improvement of our education activities.

View full abstract

Importance of the engineering education with effective practices has recently been increased in order to enhance students′ motivation to learning. This paper presents conditions of good teaching for enhancing educational effects suggested by authors and a teaching practice in the engineering applied subject. The teaching practices are evaluated from analyzing the students′ questionnaire of college of technology and/or university. The students′ minds to learning are discussed based on the questionnaire on the conditions of good teaching by the college students. Several opinions of authors for making educational effects in teaching practices are described.

View full abstract

Inspite efforts of rebirthing engineering education degradation of student achievement is progressing due to several reasons. In particular, introducing accrediting system in each university has actually contributed to improve engineering education. However, math achievement of student having different study path is unclear. Taking into account the math knowledge inevitable for bachelor engineer, present author proposes a concrete desirable math knowledge on differentiation, integral, ordinal and extraordinal differential equation, vector, tensor and complex variables at graduation, derived from his teaching career at department of mechanical engineering.

View full abstract

The purpose of my study was to develop of cooperative learning support on Educational Function as Teamwork in Project-based Learning with Regional Cooperation. Analysis of validation of the original method were made using correlation analysis of student satisfaction of relationships among teammate and educational function as teamwork, result of self-diagnose. As a result, we achieved analysis results with a collective creativity were involved in student′s planning skill. It was shown that educational functions as teamwork plays an important part in the growth of students. Our study revealed that there was method using cooperative learning technique helps to promote improvement of educational function as teamwork.

View full abstract

Recently, a number of students have entered the college of technology with no experience of dismantling and assembling of even an easy machine (including toys) . It is necessary to study the correct usage of tools for lower grade students as a base of the technical education for dismantling and assembling of the machine. However, enough understanding has not been obtained though the usage of the tool is trained for first grade students. So, we executed the development on the teaching text and material of student practice curriculum, which is attractive subject of all-terrain vehicle [ATV]′s dismantling and assembling for lower grade students. This practice make the student learn both how to use the tools and the steer mechanism of car through the dismantling and assembling of ATV. The text book and sub-teaching materials of this practice curriculum were created in cooperation with fifth grade students as graduation research. As a result, an effective teaching and learning text and sub-teaching materials in manufacturing practice could be developed from student′s point of view.

View full abstract

The education of information and communication technologies is important for engineering, and it includes terminals, communication media, transmission, switching, software, communication protocols, coding, etc. The proposed teaching method for protocols is based on the HDLC (High-level Data Link Control) procedures using our newly developed software “HDLC trainer” , and includes the extensions for understanding other protocols such as TCP/IP. As for teaching the coding theory that is applied for the error control in protocols, we use both of a mathematical programming language and a general-purpose programming language. We have practiced and evaluated the proposed teaching method in our college, and it is shown that the method has remarkable effects for understanding the fundamental technology of protocols and coding.

View full abstract