This paper describes a course of intellectual property rights which consists of knowledge acquisition subjects, design exercises for the creation of engineering devices, and design contests incorporating realistic constraints. Both design exercises and design contests are important for students to understand the objectives of intellectual property systems and the application of intellectual property rights. The design exercises with user’ s requirements and several realistic constraints improve the design ability of the students. The design contests for the proposal and the conceptualization of engineering devices advance the student’ s creativity.

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Kanazawa Institute of Technology requires all the students to take engineering design classes in their freshman years. During these classes the students are asked to rate their own engineering design abilities to self-assess their acquisition of engineering and social skills. The authors employed clustering and text-mining techniques to analyze survey data collected over time from more than 1,100 students in order to gain insight for instructional improvement. The students were found to be clustered into nine groups with meaningful characteristics. Text mining techniques were employed on the results of the free response section to extract 41 keywords and determine their frequency of appearance. These results will lead to finding the common motivations or hindrances that underlie high and low achieving students.

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Our college concluded the agreement of international exchange with Kasetsart University in Thailand in 2002. Especially, as one of the methods for conducting the career education, the delivery lecture “Handmade Robot Workshop” for Kasetsart attached school students has been carried out by the author and advance course students. As a result, the attached school students were interested in handicraft and developed their creativity. Our advanced course students, as a teaching assistant (TA) , came to understand the necessity of handicraft, and they tried to attend the class actively. Moreover, it was remarkable that they got higher scores of TOEIC. At last, it was clear that TA activity helped them to raise the awareness of their future course as engineers.

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In Japan, the career education has been promoted according to the growth of students. However, in the Southeast Asian area, it is not necessarily well developed. In order to strengthen the international cooperation, Japanese higher education organization has to support the career education of Southeast Asian countries. In this research, the delivery lecture of handicraft was introduced as one of the methods of promoting the career education for internationally cooperative university and the effectiveness of the delivery lecture was investigated. As a result, the delivery lecture proved effective in not only enhancing the students’ motivation and fostering their creativity but also raising the awareness of their future course as engineers who see situations from others’ points of view.

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We have developed a new program of environmental education to train students for future creative engineers who can contribute for solving global problems (including energy problems and environment problems) . In this program, students can take a variety of experiential learning and discuss the global problems from various viewpoints to form their own opinions. We started the program in 2005 and have expanded it gradually to the present style, which consists of several sub-projects. The program has the following characteristics ; (1) it is a collaborative project of teachers and researchers in various fields (humanities, science, and engineering) , that is, a collaboration of all the four faculties in our college ; (2) all the members attend the project on a voluntary basis ; (3) students can take a variety of experiential learning.

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Hob processing is an important machining method for fabricating the gear. However, many students and peoples cannot understand this machining mechanism because they don’ t have a chance to see the actual processing. With this background, we tried a creative and educational project entitled “Designing and manufacturing of hobbing machine” . On the other hand, it might be a burden for the teaching staff to instruct the designing and manufacturing project. In this paper, we summarize and analyze the effect of practicing the above hobbing machine on the basis of the answers to a questionnaire provided by the guest of an exhibition. Moreover, we describe the effect of the instructing method to check each other’ s work to apply the designing and manufacturing project.

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The present paper describes the introduction of sociobiology and robotics to high school students through the Science Partnership Program (SPP) planed by the ministry of education and science. We prepared three days program. In the first day, we introduced sociobiology and communication method of insects. In the second day, students worked experiment using swarm robots. And, in the final day, students discussed the future of swarm robots. By this program, many students interested in science and engineering.

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At Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) , a new e-portfolio system “Engineering Ethics Portfolio” was developed as a holistic assessment tool to assess the outcomes of engineering ethics education. This new system is expected to analyze the successive effects of our entire general education program especially that of its three core required courses. This new tool is also aimed at preparing for the international trend of quality assurance. To develop an effective well-balanced program, we need to evaluate our whole program with its original criteria. KIT has already developed a “Self-evaluate Portfolio” in “KIT Portfolio System.” This new assessment tool was made from modifying the existing portfolio. This article reports and discusses this new approach.

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Open Course Ware (OCW) has been growing up worldwide. Most universities launched OCW-site with text based lecture notes at first, but recently many universities have begun to publish lecture videos as well as lecture notes. We initially propose the ‘Social Curator Collaboration Model’ which creates an environment that general public user other than course lecturer can participate as learning assistant to reply to other learner’ s questions or opinions. We also propose Web-API function mash-up architectural design to realize OCW common platform with typical workflow of ‘Social Curator Collaboration Model’ . We have evaluated the functionality of our proposed model by prototyping the infrastructure and challenged it with real OCW lecture video.

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University students undergoing training in auto mechanics inevitably have to carry out hazardous tasks during practical automotive maintenance exercises. Therefore, it is necessary to equip them with safety skills during these exercises and to foster within them an understanding of work safety. In this study, we classified maintenance tasks into various types, determined the maintenance tasks that students had misconceptions about, and investigated the causes for these misconceptions. Furthermore, by investigating Hiyari-Hatto incidents reported by these students during the exercises, we assessed the level of awareness about safety procedures among them and evaluated their maintenance skills. We found that more than 30% of the students had experienced Hiyari-Hatto incidents during their practical automotive maintenance exercises.

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In order to understand a weak point of electrical insulation of power apparatus for post graduate students, we developed an integrated class which consists of a high voltage seminar, high voltage testing, presentation and keynote lecture by a visiting lecturer. In 2009, as our institute increased coursework period from 10 weeks to 15 weeks, we added an electrical field analysis to this integrated class to increase further the depth of understanding of the weak point of electrical insulation. After the class was finished, we investigated a degree of satisfaction of this class. As the results, we found that the electrical field analysis is effective for further increase of the depth of understanding of the weak point of electrical insulation. This paper describes the detail of this integrated class.

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Extensive reading (ER) is proved to be an effective approach for Japanese engineering students to improve fluency in English. But it is only effective in limited conditions, and the condition in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings is widely different from English as the second language (ESL) settings, where former ER programs are conducted. This article focuses on the critical factors that separate successful ER programs in EFL settings from failure, based on the authors’ experiences of conducting a 5-year-long ER program. In a long-term sustained silent reading (SSR) program that guides students to start reading from simple stories (SSS) , reluctant EFL learners have the maximum opportunity to improve their English fluency to the required level for novice engineers.

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This paper describes the importance of providing engineering students with a basic understanding of the engineering design and proposes an integrated curriculum for engineering design and creativity exercises. The Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) defined engineering design as “an iterative open-ended process of creativity” , and JABEE inspects teachings for developing student’ s creativity through problem based learning at the program review. Most universities and colleges added exercises of creativity to their curriculum, but do not teach the basics of the engineering design process in their programs. On the contrary, ABET defined engineering design as “the process of devising a system, component, or process to meet desired needs” . Typically, engineering design is the process of developing a new product in a company. The author proposes an effective curriculum for engineering design education. Understanding the principles of the engineering design process and applying this knowledge to the manufacturing process are necessary for engineering students to study engineering design effectively.

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This paper presents an approach to learning-by-teaching education. This education method aims to improve communication ability, class-handling and creativeness of students who attend as teachers during a class. This educational method showed the following effect. The slow-learning students who took the lectures of learning-by-teaching education came to obtain equal mathematical ability with high-learning students who did not take the lectures of that.

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In this study, we have developed the fluid dynamics teaching materials in a learning program of connecting the lecture and the practical science based on the collaboration between industry and academia. Furthermore, we have practiced fluid dynamics education with these teaching materials and let students really experience the phenomenon of the fluid. As a result of questionnaires survey, many students thought that fluid dynamics was difficult at first. However, it was shown that the education with these teaching materials could let many students be interested in fluid dynamics.

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To visualize the Fleming’ s left hand rule using ion species as charged particles in aqueous solution, the discharge reactions of the Daniel’ s cell and the redox reaction of Fe²⁺/Fe³⁺ were carried out under vertical magnetic field. A copper tube was united with a circular transparent acryl resin plate, which was employed as an electrolytic cell. A zinc or carbon rods was centrally inserted into the acryl resin plate of the cell. The cell was placed on a permanent magnets (neodymium and ferrite magnets) or an originally prepared electromagnet. The geometrical arrangement was shown in Fig. 5. The cell was filled with electrolyte solution : 0.1 mol/L CuSO₄ aqueous solution for the discharge reaction of the Daniel’ s cell and 0.1 mol/L H₂SO₄ aqueous solution containing 0.1 mol/L FeSO₄ and 0.1 mol/L Fe₂ (SO₄) ₃ for the redox reaction of Fe²⁺/Fe³⁺. The vortex motion of the electrolyte solutions originated from the Lorentz’ s force was clearly observed as soon as the cell reactions and the redox reaction took place under the vertical magnetic field caused by the electromagnet. The vortex motion visualized Fleming’ s left hand rule. The magnitude of the vortex motion was estimated by the rotation rate (rotation number a second) . The higher the rate became, the larger the electrolytic current of the redox reaction of Fe²⁺/Fe³⁺or the stronger the magnetic field was, which showed the quantitative relationship of the Lorentz’ s force. On the other hand, for the Daniel’ s cell, the rate decreased accompanying a decrease of the discharge current in time. The experiment was introduced for college students as estimators.

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The University of Tokyo established the team “The University of Tokyo Formula Factory” for “Student Formula SAE Competition of JAPAN” that started in 2003 organized by Japan Society of Automotive Engineers’ , and it has participated from the 1st competition. “Easy Drive” is assumed to be the main concept under the basic philosophy “Aim at the victory by a conception different from the others” . The team adopted the power unit with Electronically controlled Continuously Variable Transmission (E-CVT) for the big scooter that no one uses, installing many systems of the world first, and got the 1^st prize in the 7^th event in 2009. How to advance the project and the effect of the personnel training by making them with new technological developments are verified.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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