Academic institutions throughout the world are called upon to prepare engineers to meet challenges as defined by industry, a nation, or the world. They shoulder a significant portion of the responsibility for defining the content, designing the delivery, and providing pathways to experiential learning. Each institution develops curricula to educate its students using the resources and talents at its disposable, and within the culture in which it is situated. The blend of diverse approaches is a strength. There are, however, some elements that are becoming increasingly important for all programs. Preparing students for a global workforce is one such component. Similar to other aspects of engineering education, the manner in which individual institutions address global preparedness is not, nor should it be, uniform. This paper summarizes current engineering enrollment trends in the United States, and discusses some viable strategies to prepare students in the US to enter a global workforce.

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In recent years European cooperation projects have worked successfully towards the development of the European Higher Education Area: several important results have been achieved by facing the grand challenges of the near future. Among these ones: to complete the Bologna Process, to attract to engineering studies some of the best young minds, to offer good LLL opportunities, to broaden the formation to include non-technical skills without lowering the scientific/technical level of the learning process, to enhance the collaboration between universities and enterprises on educational issues and, last but not least, to develop, test and spread a European system of Quality Assurance for the accreditation of Engineering Programmes (the EUR-ACE System) .
European Engineering Education shall now definitely look beyond the borders of the old continent, aiming to affirm its quality and improve its attractiveness across the Atlantic and in newly emerging economies. At the present moment, EUGENE (EUropean and Global ENgineering Education), a new European Academic Network in the field of Engineering Education supported by the European Commission within the LLP programme is opening itself to the cooperation with academics, students, industrialists and professional partners worldwide: the umbrella for this cooperation has just been established through IFEES and could serve brilliantly to this scope. Eventually, it is expected that the EUR-ACE accreditation system will further spread throughout Europe and gain importance at global scale.

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At the beginning of 21C, many universities in Korea had been posted research oriented universities. So, researches have been emphasized during last decades. Therefore the evaluation systems for faculties were also changed with this direction. So, many universities were only considered and focused on research rather than education. Within such kind of situation, most faculty members in universities in Korea have been tried to achieve to show the capability of their research activities not in education. Also, the evaluation of research activities is much easier than that of education. It is more seriously appear in engineering area. During last 10 years, the gap between the amounts of efforts to put into research and education increases. As a result, engineering education in Korea needs some more attention. Recently, College of Engineering at Yonsei University tried to figure out what is the fact of faculty evaluation system. We made survey to the engineering faculty members for their opinion about the evaluation system because it is directly and indirectly related to the engineering education. From the results, it is time to change the evaluation system for emphasizing engineering education and research at the same time.

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As Japan faces the challenge of a declining engineering population, educators in engineering must attract, develop, and produce engineers who are ready for innovation and global cooperation in order to maintain the country’ s technical advantage. A key approach to engineering education that helps these requirements is virtual instrumentation, the use of customizable software and modular hardware to create user-defined measurement systems. Made productive by a graphical programming environment called LabVIEW, virtual instrumentation provides an open and common platform on which engineers and engineering educators can design experiments, share results, and collaborate with others on projects in laboratory experimentation, research, and design. In this paper, we will examine a few examples of virtual instrumentation in engineering education and international cooperation as well as study the tools that make them possible..

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Tohoku University has been offering a project-based hands-on program to the first year of graduate level (MSc) students. The program was initiated under the support from ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology (MEXT), Japan in 2005, and designed so that the students can learn how to make a mechanical system work in a real world through the experience of a short-term project with a small size of group members. The goal of each project is, for example, to develop a model airplane that can fly autonomously, to develop an autonomous mobile robot that can travel and reach a given destination in outdoor field, or to develop a robot system for a world championship. In order to achieve their goals, the students experience a number of trials and errors. They also learn the importance of the communication among the members, the consequence of the scheduling and time management, the hardship of the troubleshooting, and finally the joy of the success. In this paper, the author describes some examples of such hands-on projects conducted both in domestic and international education programs.

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AEESEAP is the acronym for the Association for Engineering Education in Southeast and East Asia and the Pacific. The Association was formed in 1973 with the support of UNESCO. During the 36 years of development, however, the economic situation drastically changed among the member countries and AEESEAP must seek for new approach to achieve the aims and goals established at the beginning. The Executive Meeting held in Tokyo in 2008 was a turning point to adjust the AEESEAP activities to cope with new development. Accreditation of engineering education program is very important issue internationally, and AEESEAP decided to have a workshop towards one of the international accreditation program, Washington Accord. This paper describes the workshop held in May, 2010 in Manila, Philippines.

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Microsystems called MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) have been studied for 40 years. This technology is an extension of microfabrication for integrated circuits. Value added devices can be produced by integrating not only transistors but also sensors, actuators and microstructures heterogeneously on a silicon chip. Engineering education is considered based on this experience as follows. The purpose is to create jobs by supporting industry. Practical experiences of all the fabrication steps of a prototype are effective for the engineering education. The facility for the prototyping should be shared by many groups and equipments should be small and simple. Open collaboration is important to accumulate knowledge and to make it accessible. Education for self-motivated students can be performed by their successful experiences.

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Mitsubishi Electric Corporation develops and is producing a lot of mechatronics products such as the FA equipment, in-vehicle equipment, the elevator, the industrial machinerys, and information devices. The one to be called total engineering that unites the specialized field like mechatoronics, the control, the actuator, the sensor, and the simulation, etc. is necessary for designing and manufacturing these products. We decided to press independence to a young mechatoronics engineer in total to development and the designer with a different specialized field. As a result, we planned the mechatoronics course that integrated a lot of technical fields more than before for five days for the young mechatoronics engineer, and began in fiscal year 2007.

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High skill and technique cannot be succeeded in various fields. The aging of masters and shortage of successors with change of recent social situation is serious problem. To preserve and succeed the individual specialized technique and skill, it is needed to be changed to datum with objectivity and reproducibility. In this research, a traditional handmade wooden ship is selected as the object. The new method of succeeding to the skill and technique is proposed using multimedia as movie, photo, sound and voice, documents and 3D-CAD data in that fabrication process. The paper model and wooden scale model are made by learning using those media, and which media is effective for enabling preservation and the succession in each process is studied.

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This paper describes a creative education program for first year students at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kinki University. In this program of the “paper car race” competitions, students learn the entire product development process, from conceptual design to drafting to manufacturing and evaluation. Competitions include the slope climbing race, the speed race and the design contest. Students use only paper and bamboo for the axis, but are provided with the motor and battery box. The improvement in student motivation to learn mechanical engineering and mechanical design is inquired. In addition, statistical analyses were conducted to examine the correlation coefficient for the comprehensive evaluation. Student motivation did improve through the competition in which they created imaginative and original work. Many students felt that they had learned the importance of conceptual design, drafting and project management.

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Department of aeronautics is founded at Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 2004 to educate future engineers who will be able to play an important role in the aircraft design and development at aviation industries. Authors, who are teaching staffs at the department, have developed an engineering education program based on the aircraft design for senior students. The features of the program are as follows : (1) Students design not the part of an aircraft but a whole aircraft. (2) One student designs one aircraft. (3) The aircraft which a student designs should includes new ideas to improve the performance compared to that of currently-operated aircrafts. In this report, the education program mentioned above is presented. It is observed that most students in this program work hard to acquire knowledge on the aeronautical engineering field and skills to conduct computer simulation through the design process of the aircraft.

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Good communication skills are essential for students majoring in engineering today. We focused on how to promote the efficient teaching of oral presentations using JECPRESE, The JapaneseEnglish Corpus of Presentations in Science and Engineering. This paper reports the lexical frequency analysis of parts of speech units found in 109 Japanese presentations given in partial fulfillment of master′s degree requirements by graduate students in chemical and mechanical engineering. The presentations from both disciplines showed about the same numbers of units for most grammatical classes, suggesting that such units are basic to the language of science and technology. The exception was with verbal nouns and field-specific nouns, for which detailed lists could be prepared for each discipline. Interestingly, further examination of the lexicon revealed an influence of English usage on Japanese technical expressions. Our findings suggest that new Japanese expressions are being created to deal with what is being expressed in English, especially for discussing the results.

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To attempt the basic power improvement of mechanical engineering for the young engineer who was not able to learn mechanical engineering enough in the university and the Technical College education in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, “Mechanical engineering basic power improvement course” is executed. This course aims and assumes that the young engineer to acquires the base of mechanical engineering, to polish a mechanical engineering sense, to learns past trouble, to learn the technology used in products of our company, to make it to the chance of the study in the future. This thesis introduces the content of the course and the execution condition, shows participant and participant’ s superiors′ questionnaires, and shows the effect of the course execution.

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[in Japanese]

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