Haptic interface uses the sense of touch to exchange information between the user and the computer. Haptic interface is thus a promising technology that can expand the application range of the computer. For engineering education, it has recently been proposed to utilize the haptic devices to support understanding of theory. This is because that the haptic devices possibly provide rapid improvement in the educative effect by attracting student’ s interest through the real experience by the touch interaction. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey and overview of the haptic interface and then the applications potentiality of the haptic interface to engineering education with those problems and solutions. Moreover the challenges are discussed when the haptic interface is applied to the engineering education overall.

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This paper describes a project for planning, execution, and evaluation of project management (PM) education in a junior high school. The project was conducted with cooperation of PM professional organization, junior high school, and university. The educational purpose is to give students communication skills, team work, planning skill, and awareness of the relation between society and technologies. Challenges are to design programs in such a way that keeps students interested, and builds a sustainable educational framework which enables the school to continue the education. The education is composed of three parts. The first part is to provoke communications among student team members. In the second and third parts, teams develop project plan, design and build a tower and a house.

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In this paper, we introduce spiral engineering education program of Innovation Center for Research and Engineering Education (ICREE) which has been founded since 2005 in order to carry out engineering education for undergraduate and graduate students in Utsunomiya University. This program is different from piled up educational program which has been carried out usually in university. ICREE has presented several kinds of original lectures for students. At first, problem-based learning program for freshmen is adopted as a practical lecture. Groups composed of students are required to grapple with a given problem through discussion and research within each group, for which there can be more than one solution. It is necessary for students to find out a solution of their own by trying various strategies and approaches. ICREE gives a series of lecture for sophomore students. Skilled engineers in industries are invited to give a talk to students on such topic as company organization, product development, and related technologies. Students are able to have a glimpse of innovative activities in the industries through skilled engineers. ICREE also provides students with internship programs, in which the students work together with employee of company for a short period and are expected to obtain first-hand experiences in engineering, so that they will recognize the meaning and values of what they have to learn professional lectures in university. These educational systems mentioned above have been performed linking with professional subjects of department, as if it were a spiral staircase.

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With the background of our university’ s advantageous constitution of both art and engineering departments, we have developed a curriculum that educates students with regard to both technological knowledge and artistic capability. In this paper, we introduce an intensive seminar that we have developed for training students’ skill of collaboration and communication with people who are from other technical domains. The seminar sets the target to sophomore students who are supposed to have finished general subjects and not to be specialized to each department too much. The students make a small group and work on an assignment of developing an interactive system that requires both technical and artistic skills and finally make a presentation on their works in the classroom.

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Internship has been applied widely for a lot of university, high school and so on. Recently, there are many kinds of internship, for example, term, place and job. Nihon university prepares internship as a technical lecture, and students meet the work on mechanical engineering in the company more than two weeks. In short, they work as well as employee, and experience practical internship. As a result of this internship, it could not reduce the number of students who worries about working. However this internship could notice their poorness even though they attend passively. Additionally it was revealed that students who experienced practical internship try to improve their ability before getting a job.

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The purpose of this paper is to propose a workshop-based educational program for undergraduates to foster their communication abilities. In the recent trend of citizen involvement, engineers and scientists have been required to acquire the abilities to communicate not only with specialists of other fields but also with lay citizens. More specifically, it is important for them to foster the ability to share and solve the problem through discussion with people who have different backgrounds. To respond to these emerging social demands, we developed the educational program for undergraduates to foster such communication abilities that include the basic communicative skills, the ability to think logically, and the ability of explaining. The program consists of activities such as group discussions, problem-solving in a group, and making a presentation of their ideas in an easily comprehensible manner, in terms of which students trained their communication abilities. The program is designed as versatile so that it can be carried out by any teachers at any universities. We report the cases in which the program was conducted at several universities and show the results of questionnaires on the satisfaction of the program targeting both teachers and students who joined it.

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In today’ s engineering education, it is indispensable to develop an education program for improving communication capability. And it is important to have meaningful evaluation systems to measure the effectiveness of such a program. Nonetheless, an objective method of evaluation has not yet to be established. In this paper, I reviewed previous cases about the definition of communication and the education methods, so as to clarify the issue. I then move on to describe our struggle to develop an evaluation system which makes use of conceptual networks, rubrics, and evaluations of the scientific literacy of participants. Although these methods are integral to the definition of communication capability and educational methods, it is necessary to improve the objectivity and the feasibility.

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Practical use of a debate exercise is discussed for the purpose of education of ethical decision-making for engineers. Two themes are used for cultivation of a broad outlook on engineering ethics. One involves the principal responsibility of the stakeholders in failure cases. The other has to do with validity of whistle-blowing. Proper intervention of lecturers is required to enhance the educational effects. For example, lecturers should evaluate the argument made by student debaters. They also should evaluate judgment made by student judges. The debate prompts the students to understand structures of ethical problems and to devise a schema of problem solving. The latter is enhanced by various exercises such as suggestions of a remedy for ethical problems for student audiences.

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School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, carried out the questionnaire survey to investigate the awareness of the parents of our students on PhD course work. In this paper, the result is analyzed in detail, emphasizing the negative impression on PhD holders and related issues, with multivariate analysis. In conclusion, in the case that the parents have concrete negative impression, they will strongly oppose their children’ s wish to enter PhD course. The parents, who only have indirect information source such as the media, tend to have negative impression, comparing to the parents with direct access to PhD holders. Therefore, the accurate publicity is essential for encouraging the parents to allow their children to enter PhD course.

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